"...do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."

"For the good of the Air Force, for the good of the armed services and for the good of our country, I urge you to reject convention and careerism..."
- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Maxwell AFB, April 21, 2008

"You will need to challenge conventional wisdom and call things like you see them to subordinates and superiors alike."
- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, United States Air Force Academy, March 4, 2011

Monday, December 25, 2023

Air Force Amn/NCO/SNCO Facebook Group Behind the Jet As Usual


 

Just got notified that a post I made on the Air Force Amn/NCO/SNCO Facebook Group page got approved.  Today.  And the rocket scientists that frequent that page made comments like indicating they don't understand the legal argument (that government officials should not use their official positions to censor others so long as they're doing it on Facebook).

So I edited my post to clue these folks in.  Which then resulted in the post being relegated back to the bin of "safety" and again requiring admin approval.  The only thing that page is safe from is common sense.  At least the admins were quicker about approving the edit though.

That's good.  Now un-American nutters that frequent that Facebook page (like Jason Burns) can save their un-American comments where they cheer on government censorship of the speech of citizens it disagrees with.  Or, in Jason's case, keep on making it clear why our military is so spectacularly failing the American people.
 


Saturday, December 16, 2023

Yes, GearPig, You Should Have

 

To support and defend, the oath you took, meant demanding yourself, your peers, your superiors and others in the government you held office in, meet the higher standard of public service.  It's not an either or thing, that would have been you meeting the standard you agreed to when you entered federal public office.

Getting good OPRs and pleasing your boss wasn't enough.  Flying a tight ILS approach wasn't enough.

You are correct that it's too late and that ship has sailed.  That has been obvious for some time now.  When the digital water cooler you moderated saw our rights as an annoyance and evidence of tin foil thinking and when your peers celebrated their tools of the trade being used to murder Americans in violation of the Fifth Amendment, it should have been clear.  So also when they joked about fuse settings for munitions to drop on Occupy protestors or when they lashed out at Edward Snowden for trying to get the government to meet standards.  Your peers have long demonstrated that they were unfit for public office and that was the culture that was accepted and celebrated.

And now we are seeing the results of that lack of character combined with a massive disparity in technology between those inside the walls, and the peasants outside them.  Almost comically, some of your peers don't yet realize which side of the wall they're actually on.  Supporting our Constitution, bearing true faith and allegiance to it, is a selfish act as much as the mark of a professional public servant.  A DD214 makes poor body armor when a tyrannical government, filled with the current crop of fascist thugs disgracing their uniforms, is given an order by the degenerate culture you've identified as operating the levers of power.  The Green Beret from Idaho could have told you that, so could any number of J6 protestors currently rotting in prison cells for exercising their First Amendment rights.

It is too late.  It will get so much worse.  And so it goes.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Liz the "Lawman" Pushes Neo-Con Subjugation of America on Behalf of Foreign Nations

 


The ironically named Lawman never fails to spread neo-con talking points in his quest to continue the damage to America brought about by the military industrial complex.  Reading his tripe for years, I'm almost convinced "he" is actually Liz Cheney in drag behind a keyboard.  Clever lady.

But not clever enough (despite taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution) to realize that Americans already elected representatives who already passed a law way back in 1865 (the highest law that can be passed, ie a constitutional amendment) which already makes the draft illegal.  That Thirteenth Amendment to our Constitution clearly states with unambiguous text:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

But people like Lawman don't care about that.  They'll even try to "law" their way out of it with "interpretation" and appeals to government authority (by which they mean power).  For example, pointing to lesser and lower laws which clearly are null and void as they contradict the clear supreme law that is our Thirteenth Amendment.  Lawman says, "See, our government ignores our supreme law and does it anyway, so that means that's the path forward and consensus and get your ass on the train..."  Any restrictions on a "free" country conscripting young adults and throwing them into a thresher to defend some foreign "free" country, must be ignored.  The war machine must be fed while it destroys our economy, makes us less safe, and replaces able bodied men with double amputees and wreaths.

Liz Lawman, please move to the foreign country of your choice if America and its laws and the will of its people are not to your liking.  Please stop damaging our nation from the inside by cloaking yourself in a uniform that you disgrace.  Thanks lady.

Oh, and say hi to your boyfriend, Adam Kinzinger, for me.  If you can pry him away from ClearedHot of course.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Photo of Pawnman Posting on BaseOps

 


In case it's not obvious, Pawnman is the nav in this photo who doesn't have a green head.

Monday, November 13, 2023

The United States of America - a Tyranny Beyond Measure


 

Imagine a huge apple orchard with a couple dozen people in it.  Millions of apples and only a few stomachs to feed.  The people in the orchard are fond of saying "no place on earth has as much freedom to eat apples as our orchard."

A few people in the group set up guard towers around the orchard with machine guns.  They say it's to protect the orchard.  They then mandate the population wear bio-metric devices that can temporarily paralyze their bodies if the devices sense that a person is about to fall out of a tree while collecting apples, and sending out an alert for others to rescue the individual.

Now a couple people in the group point out that this is a very dangerous development and cite historical examples of other orchard communities throughout history that have had a rough go from similar measures.  The others in the group, however, call these people "conspiracy theorists" and point out that everybody is going about their business eating as many apples as they want.  

"Just look around, it might not be perfect here but there is no place better!"

This simple little analogy pales in comparison to what has happened in the United States of America.  In our nation, the vast majority of our communications are surveilled, analyzed, and saved.  The weapons of warfare are far beyond machine guns with cheap drones, satellites, and other robotic devices obliterating any chance of an American population defending itself from a tyrannical government.  Appeals to the Second Amendment right to own AR-15s are even less useful than had the Incans demanded the Spaniards respect their right to own spears.

And now, the United States government has passed a law requiring private auto industries install technology in newly made vehicles that will allow the government to surveil a vehicle's location and movements so that it can detect if an individual is driving under the influence and then disable their vehicle.  One representative offered an amendment to strip this dystopian power from the bill, but it was defeated.  In a House of Representatives where the Republican party has the majority.  People must be safe from falling out of trees while picking apples!

Since September 11th, 2001 this nation has become an undeniable overt tyranny.  Absolutely undeniably.  No hyperbole.

Americans have been murdered without charge or trial by the federal government.  All Americans are spied on in their communications.  The government decides who can say what and when in their communications online.  The media is almost entirely owned (both "sides") and is the number one purveyor of falsehoods to the American people while protecting the dishonest in power.  Alternative media is also not immune to nefarious forces and if your journalism reports truthful things the tyrants want hidden, you might find the same fate as Julian Assange.  Every citizen is a journalist when they speak to an audience, and even if your comment is humorous and not particularly noteworthy, if it angers the wrong tyrant you may find yourself sentenced to a decade in a cage as Douglas Mackey recently discovered.  If you protest your government on public property you may be put in prison after a kangaroo court proceeding by a government that has labeled you an enemy of the state for your political views.  If you try to exercise your right to vote, you may find the government intelligence community launches an unprecedented lie campaign while a water main breaks in the middle of the night followed by a shocking last minute political victory, or you may not experience such if your candidate is arrested and taken off the ballot after a political prosecution.

If you refuse an injection into your body your government may require you to stay in your home; a mandate more easily enforced when your vehicle refuses to start.

An American citizen in the 1940s living in Manzanar, California could have stayed in the rustic barracks set up for them, played cards, and convinced themselves that they were free people doing as they pleased.  So long as they didn't look outside and see the guard towers and the machine guns pointed inward at them.

All these steps are purposeful and have nothing to do with safety while picking apples.  They are evidence that the end state will not simply be more status quo of politicians being liars and thieves that we are used to and which we delude ourselves won't affect us, but rather it will be a nightmare that cannot be measured by other examples from history because no other nation has ever had a population more surveilled and more easily controlled than the American populace of today.  Unable to defend itself even close to adequately against an increasingly militarized and technologically unstoppable government, unable to communicate with other citizens, and even unable to travel.  These steps are not being taken by the Devil we know for the Devil we know.

The shaping operations that are taking place in our nation today indicate the physical fall of the Unites States after those, paid off inside the castle walls, open the doors to the enemy outside which employs them.

The nightmare coming to our nation will be unprecedented, just as the steps taken to bring about our nation's destruction have been.  It is accelerating.  This is not something far off in the distance.  It's happening now.

God help us all.

Friday, November 3, 2023

Negative Their Negatory - There is No "Hate Speech" Exception to the First Amendment

 


The judiciary has been steadfast in knocking down this fascist talking point that somehow free speech is limited when dealing with "hate speech."  So called hate speech is, of course, any speech that somebody doesn't like.  Too bad, lump it, avert your eyes, people have a right to express views that you might idiotically label "hate speech" even though that makes you angry that you can't muzzle your neighbors you disagree with.

Perhaps before you run your yap online in the future, you'll do a little research into the topic.  That may have led you to a great many Supreme Court rulings that have all made clear that there is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment.  For example, Matal v. Tam might be worth a gander:

[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”


As somebody who has taken an oath to support the Constitution, you might want to stop lying to denigrate the rights enshrined in it.  Technique only.

P.S.  The fact that you edited your post but still left in "ethnical standards" along with your false factual claims, might be reason for you to stop internetting.  You're not very good at it.

Friday, October 20, 2023

Sua Stupidity - No, Actually You Are Very Much Charged With Interpreting the Constitution

 


Standard-issue idiot thinks that his oath to support and defend the Constitution does not mean understanding and interpreting the Constitution.  Perhaps he is unaware of how language works and how one must interpret words in order to support and defend written words.

Of course this absolute mouth-breather is referring to the idiotic viewpoint that our Supreme Court interprets the Constitution for us.  That view requires one ignore Article Six of our Constitution which requires all officers of the United States, to include Supreme Court justices, take the same oath to support the Constitution (which would be a silly requirement if the Supreme Court justices were interpreting the Constitution for everybody and therefore writing the Constitution themselves with every opinion).

Even if this dingus thought that was how it works (he doesn't), certainly Sua Stupidity here doesn't get an order from his boss and then tell his boss to "standby one" while he hits up West Law in order to research case law to make sure that he's acting in accordance with the Supreme Court's case law.  He doesn't do that.

What he does, however, is spread anti-American unconstitutional horseshit on social media along with his comrades.

And in case anybody is keeping score, Sua and his un-American friends are winning.  Mightily.

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Lt Col Jason P. Williams: Refusing to Violate 2A Good, Refusing to Violate 5A Bad

For unprincipled people like Lt Col Jason P. Williams, one chooses their opinions like selecting from a salad bar.  "What looks good today?  Oh, I had that yesterday, today I'll try..."

As he navigates what opinions are popular, he has apparently stumbled upon the opinion that it is a good thing that a government employed public servant has refused to carry out the orders of a sitting governor with respect to violating the Second Amendment.  That's a good thing.  Lt Col Williams chose his salad wisely this go around.


But it wasn't long ago when Williams was brow beating your humble blogger, also a government employed public servant, for refusing an order to assassinate an American citizen outside a war zone who was no imminent threat.  Apparently his salad doesn't include the 5th Amendment right not to have life taken without due process of law.

Government refusing to unlawfully take the liberty and property of American gun owners is good.  Government refusing to unlawfully take the lives of Americans is bad.  And since Lt Col Williams isn't a sheriff, but rather a B-1 weapons officer in the Air Force, he can sing the praises of a sheriff with spine, but he can't be bothered to question unlawful orders that might come down to him and he doesn't appreciate those who do question such orders.  They're almost as bad as those military folks who refused to get the shot that he would have punished were he a commander rather than a back seater former ROTC instructor.

Good to see he's now advocating for "lawyering" unlawful orders from higher authority and crediting such action with having a spine.  It only took twenty years of uniformed "service" to get there.  I look forward to his new found principled view changing next week though.

Saturday, September 2, 2023

FAA Scrubbing Pilots with Unreported VA Disability Conditions....

This recent comment from Danger41 in a thread about veteran pilots playing fast and loose with the VA disability system, makes me wonder if memory loss isn't one of those conditions the FAA is looking into.  Memory loss and bouts of pure stupidity are definitely a danger for one.  Sadly, when demonstrated by a "public servant" like this war hero, it's a danger for all.

Selective memory is popular these days and, like so many VA disability claims, is often the result of will more than it is actual disability.  For example, one might selectively forget how Dan Tarleton outed my identity.  They might then choose to forget how I responded in kind.  Proportionality is a tough concept to remember with all those diversity CBTs clogging your cranium though.

Fortunately I blogged about it.
  That was nearly a decade ago though.  Hard to remember for some.  But I've had several memory joggers through the years to assist my recollection.

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Lieutenant Colonel Jason P. Williams Taps Out After Being Pwned Man


 

Lt Col Jason P. Williams (who ironically goes by Pawnman online) has tapped out of a discussion after being taken to task for his previous pro-mandate stance for military folks and for rabidly expressing his desire to punish those who refused the vaccine.  Strangely, despite being such a friend to Big Pharma, Williams does not seem to want to swallow his medicine.

More than a decade ago I tangled with Williams online over his vociferous support for the United States military being used to assassinate American citizens absent charge or trial.  It was then that I knew he had no respect for our Constitution or for our rule of law.

More recently, I discussed his ties to Antifa operatives.

Surprisingly, before he recently tapped out of the mandate discussion, the back seater made an appeal to "Integrity first, unless it's something I don't want to do..."  An odd statement for him to make given how he tried to convince his wife to lie to the military so that he could get more cats than allowed into base housing.  Meow.

Williams shows the wisdom of the quote attributed to Frederick Douglas, that it is easier to raise strong children than to repair broken men.  He demonstrates that no amount of debate, discussion, illumination or education can fix character flaw and the insecurity that leads to the thirst to subjugate others.

Conversation quoted for posterity:







And from the Wayback Machine...



Monday, August 14, 2023

I Have Lived a Charmed Life

My old man used to say that I lived a "charmed life."  He wasn't wrong.  In large part, perhaps almost completely in part, because of the great pains he and my mother took to provide for me and, a decade or so later, for my sister.  His long hours and sacrifices, work ethic and people skills that I lack, resulted in him climbing the rank ladder to the top and, along with my mother's long hours on her feet as a military base barber, meant that I wanted for nothing.  And that is the pinnacle of parenting, my entitled tendencies notwithstanding, as all of Nature demonstrates.

I grew up a rich kid.  Of course some kids at school wouldn't have thought so, not that I cared in the slightest or even detected that from any of them though.  I never thought that way and I still don't which makes me a bit of an oddity today as I can tell people sometimes look at me like a homeless person given my complete lack of concern for fashion.  As a kid, I got the Lee jeans and, from time to time but rarely, had to endure the shoes from a bin at K-mart or wherever with the plastic soles that had no traction whatsoever, but that was early on and hardly something to write back to my Appalachian relatives about.  Normally I got Kangaroos from K-Mart and to this day I think they were the shit.  A little pocket that I could put my key in?  Sign me up.  Went well with my Casio calculator watch that could store 50 phone numbers in it.  A watch, as it turns out, that I was still wearing as a Gunship pilot, years later, when I walked into an F-15C squadron at Tyndall AFB (I was there for a chamber ride) and the pilot at the front desk playing the part of greeter told me "nice watch."  To which I replied "if you had a watch like this you could take the number of pilots in your squadron and divide it by the number of enemy you've all killed in combat, except you'd get an error.  Because even this watch won't let you divide by zero."  Due to his career field, my old man loved Eagle Drivers.  I didn't.  But I digress.

Still, I wasn't immune from the propaganda and fashion especially as I hit high school.  I saved up for a pair of Nike Air Bo Jackson Cross Trainers from cutting lawns and my hardly-profitable (ie parent funded) paper routes, and I had an Ocean Pacific windbreaker that I could wear every day over any t-shirt.  I wasn't like my always poorly dressed (in the literal sense) classmate Lisa Udell who in sixth grade burst into tears during class because her father had just died and whose parents couldn't afford to buy her school lunch.  Rather, I was the kid who regularly convinced my mother to give me money for two school lunch tickets because one wasn't enough.  Some of which I gave to Lisa.  Many I greedily used to eat two school lunches.

I have no idea what happened to Lisa.  I've tried to find her and have failed.  I hope she is living a rich and rewarding life.  Whatever the case, I know her life was harder than mine because she didn't have a father very long and her parents couldn't provide the basics.  How would my life have ended up had I endured something similar?

I grew up a rich kid.  I never thought of it as status or ever cared about such things and, as a result, I have fortunately avoided the obsession of some of those I know who grew up poor to do anything for money and status.  I never felt poor because I wasn't.  My friends that I ran around with didn't have parents with the resources that I got to enjoy.  In fact, I think it's a safe bet that out of every other kid in the large trailer park that I grew up in, I got better Christmas presents than all of them.  I didn't have to worry about eating or if I got sick.  And while most of my friends didn't work or do chores and looked at me like I was an African child labor victim when I couldn't go play because I had to mow the lawn, they also didn't get lavished upon during the holidays.

My parents had their parenting faults as people who work two jobs while trying to scratch out a living in a hostile world do.  But Christmas definitely wasn't one of them.  I don't know how many iterations of Commodore 64 I had growing up but I do know that I had a 3.5" floppy drive for a C64 and I do know that programming that machine was as useful as it was addicting.  My parents spent a lot of money on computers and computer equipment for me in middle school and high school.  Other kids in the trailer park were not getting that.  And the time I spent learning BASIC and tinkering with machine language directly led to a great job I got in college, as a new sophomore no less, for the State of Florida as a computer programmer making way over minimum wage and getting to go to courses in other cities with paid for lodging and a rental car.  That went a long way in college.  What if my parents hadn't bought me that expensive equipment?  What if they just got me roller skates or a new Huffy bike like my neighbor friends might (if they were particularly lucky) expect?

So many forks in the road that can lead to incredibly different realities.  I remember so many forks.  And they're not all voluntary choices like some Choose-Your-Own Adventure.  Like the time in high school in Iceland when I was in Reykjavik ice-skating with some folks from school and my best friend at the time was hovering over me after I fell, and another buddy ran into him and made his skate go over my knee.  Cut me deep, blood everywhere, ambulance ride back to Keflavik only to be told they had to do surgery at the hospital in Reykjavik so they put me back in another ambulance.  I remember the bandage being changed and the blood spurting from my knee and hitting the roof of the ambulance.  Then I remember the operating table, doctors I couldn't understand dong their thing and my dad looking through the little port window in the door.  Pacing back and forth.  Then raising hell because the doctors were sewing up my knee without stopping the internal bleeding.  Then they undid their stitches and fixed the bleeding before giving me my lifelong Nike swoosh on my knee by going back to sewing up the outside.  What if my old man hadn't had the intelligence and situational awareness to monitor the actions of a trained doctor/surgeon?  I may have lost my leg or worse.  I may have never gotten to be a pilot.

I have lived an amazingly charmed life.  Mostly due to my parents.  And at so many points, my life could have changed for the worst and coming up on fifty years on this dirt ball, I realize I wouldn't have had the personal strength, competency, or character to right that ship by myself.  I am ever so fortunate to have sailed on waters not of my own creation.

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Same Drama, Different Time, and We Ran Out of It

 

Leaving aside Gearpig's continual error of attributing my identity to numerous individuals who are not me, he makes a good point.

Same drama, different time.

When I was slapping down that fascist Rainman over on the Digital Clown Show after being invited to that forum by a Gunship guy I would later attend staff meetings with, I was doing so primarily to sound the alarm about unlawful orders and the importance of our Constitution which this blog had documented.  My main thrust was an attempt to get my peers to remember the importance of their oaths, the ordinary Americans who paid their generous paychecks, and to gird themselves for the trend I saw coming.

My tone was almost academic.  Then enter Rainman who began calling me a fringe nutter and claiming I would snap and murder my colleagues.  I mentioned proportionality and that my communication style would change if I continued to get such invective in response to my commentary.  When I responded in kind, the pitchforks came out and I was booted from the group.

Any mention of our Constitution or our oath of office became an insult and an automatic reference to PYB.  Our obligation to the Constitution was a joke on BaseOps.net.  Let's not forget that point.  Spoo, who I flew with and who is now a one-star, thought calling me "Constitutional Jesus" (as though that was a title worth snickering at) was an awesome descriptor for me.  Somehow risking oneself for the nation in order to defend the rights of the Americans who paid us was seen as laughable.

In the years since, people are starting to wise up to our rule of law and the importance of our rights.  But they're far too late.  But the valuing of our supreme law was not a given on the forum, so the drama was somewhat different.  But let's not quibble on that point.

While we may assume that the drama was the same, during a different time, what should also be noted is that we have run out of that time.  The same drama at the wrong time is too late so it's not really the same drama in context.  That being said, I appreciate Gearpig trying even though he's a trillion plus dollars short and a decade late.  The absolute overt fascism of the federal government today is something we could have prevented had more Americans, and especially public servants paid to care about such things, had the appropriate values.  They didn't and so here we are.

Murdering Americans without charge or trial (via the military sworn to support and defend the rights of Americans to not be killed without due process) should have been a bit of red flag.  Similarly, all three federal branches of government signing off on the bi-partisan law allowing the President to use the military to arrest Americans without charge or trial in America and imprison them indefinitely (as FDR did) should also have gotten military officers concerned.  But it didn't.  Nor did the spying and on and on.  Fascists who don the masks of neo-con "conservatives" and then change into their progressive Woke outfits have ensured that America has become an outright tyranny.  Nsplyr on the "left" and Pawnman on the "right" can disagree on irrelevant nonsense that makes it seem as though they differ, while they both shake hands and push extraordinarily fascist un-American viewpoints and for the censorship of criticism.

None of this matters anymore though.  The time for rescuing our nation by honoring our oaths and convincing others through uncensored discussion, argument, reasoning and evidence is long gone.  It has been gone on BaseOps for an eternity now.  And there is no 1776 option or Red Dawn solution.  Violence will not save our nation, it will simply accelerate its further decline.  But that decline is inevitable.  Our nation is over and done with.  The same "drama" from black and white history books, a different time, and while we can hope we have more time to enjoy a nation that no longer exists, the reality is that Moore's Law combined with the massive tyrannical moves of our government indicate it won't be long before dummies on BaseOps are denying reality with train whistles in the background.

I also remember being a young aviator with Rich and him giving me a business card for his forum.  It had some value.  It was easily corrupted and turned into an un-American propaganda outlet as has most of the Internet and almost all of our media.  The ACLU, CATO, the SPLC, Reason Magazine, most any outlet with any reach has been converted over the decades to shape the battlefield against America.

Our center of gravity was character.  It was exploited brilliantly.  America has been conquered from the inside, by those very people paid to defend her.

There is no coming back from it.  Time?  Enjoy what little time you can and, more importantly, remember the time you guaranteed for your children with your action or inaction.

BREAK BREAK

It's interesting that you ask questions you know the answers to.  For some reason you wish to talk about me so many years after I've entered private life.  But since Jason "Pawnnan" Williams is in the thread and has a habit of missing the truth target as he drops his defamation bombs, I'll answer your questions for you.

Looking back at the thread, I missed this. So he won a legal case against the CMSgt for a Facebook ban? That's pretty funny. What ultimately happened to this guy? Did he make it to 20? I thought he either resigned or was booted from active duty over a drone issue. It's probably buried here somewhere, but didn't he post a vid of a sports car that he spent thousands on turning it into a James Bond anti-cop vehicle with electric shock door handles and a fog machine?


Yes, I successfully got the CMSAF to follow the First Amendment on social media.

Yes, I retired normally at twenty after my resignation wasn't accepted and after the Air Force ruled in my favor after I refused an unlawful order.

Yes, I owned a car that I used to showcase recording technology to others in the police accountability movement.  It was not an "anti-cop" car, it was a car meant to protect citizens from bad cops who break the law.  It was a sixty-thousand dollar car that I years ago gave away to a kid working in a gas station.

Still smarting after all these years.  Talk about staying power...

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Claims From Wayne Phelps -- On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones -- Should Not Be Trusted


I've previously blogged about how Wayne Phelps attempted to interview me for refusing to assassinate an American citizen without charge or trial and how I declined his interview.

I only recently came across this article from the Christian Science Monitor.  In this article, if the interview as published is to be believed, Phelps stated:

But this target was assigned to an Air Force drone squadron and they refused to carry it out. The leadership, and the people in the squadron, just flat out said, “We’re not going to kill an American citizen.” That takes a lot of moral courage.  Some people were fired as a result.

This is a very strange claim to say the least.  The leadership refused?  An entire squadron flat out refused?  People were fired?  Fired for what?  Refusing the mission?  If they were fired for refusing the mission, then how is it that leadership refused since leadership does the hiring and firing?

I would very strongly recommend people dismiss any claims by Phelps that come with "just trust me bro" rather than evidence.  It is my strong sense that Phelps does not write to illuminate the truth, but rather writes for a wholly different purpose.

Sunday, April 23, 2023

The Air Force Got it Right -- My Frau Pinned on O-6


For nearly a month now I have been in constant proximity to an Air Force Reserve full bird Colonel.  There have been no LORs, no attempts to UCMJ me, and no face-to-face screaming matches.  So it has been a bit of a novel experience, but not one I would normally write about.  It goes without saying that my wife's promotion is not my achievement just as it goes without saying, for those who know me, that I don't see promotion as an achievement at all.  I see promotion to O-6 as a negative indicator and likely indicative of character flaw.  While there are exceptions in my experience, and while my bias is likely less applicable in the Reserve ecosystem, promotion to a "senior leader" rank is not something to brag about in my view.  And in my wife's case, given her long list of accomplishments, military promotion doesn't even rate a mention anyway.

But I am writing about it.  So, why?  Well, because within the last couple years, I learned in casual conversation with the wife that another Colonel, many years ago, tried to ruin her military career because of my actions.  My actions which were wholly unrelated to my wife's performance.  That worthless military officer failed to ruin my wife's career, however, as my wife's promotion demonstrates, and it gives me pleasure to point that out and to remind those still serving that it is possible to do what makes sense for the nation.  Promoting excellence can be done even in these crazy days where up is down and down is up, and I like to point out when the Air Force does something right when I get the chance.  Hence this blog post.

It's odd that I would have only learned recently of the time my wife got a "kiss of death" stratification on her Officer Performance Report over a decade ago, but that's how the wife is.  She lets such things roll off her back and she doesn't get animated over things that would get my blood pumping.  So it wasn't until a recent trip down memory lane on a long drive that she mentioned that this had happened more than a decade ago.  We were discussing the time I refused an unlawful order to assassinate an American citizen, who wasn't located in a war zone and who presented no imminent threat, and how the command had contacted the base Judge Advocate General (JAG) office to start proceedings against me (likely an administrative separation) and how the JAG only later discovered that my wife, then an O-4 in the Reserves, worked for her for one month a year or whatever.

My wife had nothing to do with my case, didn't review the legal proceedings or my file, and stayed completely out of it because it would have been inappropriate, obviously, for her to have involved herself in any way.  The JAG officers work for the commander and that particular idiot commander was engaging the JAG office against me.  And yet, despite my wife having nothing to do with my actions, her boss later wrote her a performance report with the dreaded "continue to challenge" push line; a signal to promotion boards that an officer shouldn't be promoted.  Ask me how I know that.

It was a breathtaking move that demonstrated the complete lack of character that our service usually rewards through promotion.  Not just because it was wrong to attempt to punish an officer simply for being married to another officer who refused an unlawful order, but because it was as petulant a move as it would have been had Phil Jackson tried to kick Michael Jordan off the team because he didn't like something Jordan's wife had done.  It may be a stretch to liken my better half with Air Jordan, sure, fine.  But at a minimum she was a starter when the Chicago Bulls won the National Championship several years in a row.

People like to brag about their spouses, or at least some do, but I'm just stating facts.  My spouse not only graduated from Harvard and then served years on active duty as an intelligence officer, during a time of war (actual war, in the beginning of a war, when the real war stuff happens) for the most combat deployed squadron in the Air Force, but she did so with astounding competence that benefited me and my fellow Air Commandos in a meaningful way back when things were real at the start (and even before it started).  At a time when there was a real threat to us as we pushed into threat envelopes in the earliest days, and my wife was responsible for finding and pointing out threats before our missions throughout the chaos.  My wife's competence and months of twenty hour work days kept us out of trouble while the memory of Spirit 03 was fresh in our minds.

Her boss at the JAG office many years ago (I don't know, but I know) has never in her life done anything that mattered as much or done it as well.  But, to be fair, at the time my wife got the trash performance report with the embedded dagger, she was a JAG, not an intelligence officer, and so what really mattered was her legal competence.  And that's where it becomes even more clear how staggeringly petty and ridiculous this move was.  After leaving active duty, my wife attended a top ten law school on a full ride scholarship.  And then graduated number one out of that school.  And then she went on to clerk for a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

For those outside the legal community, that may not sound like that big of a deal.  The word "clerk" evokes images of a white coat behind a counter in a drug store but for those in the legal community, however, the term gives credibility to my earlier reference to the Chicago Bulls.  Books are written about the Clerkorati (a term the late great Justice Scalia used to refer to them), there are Wikipedia pages tracking them, and they are top movers and shakers in the nation who travel in powerful circles.  Their spouses are typically cut from the same cloth, with your humble blogger providing an obvious exception.  When my wife was clerking and I would visit the high court for functions, I hoped I would eventually meet another clerk's spouse who had a normal job and who didn't graduate from Yale Law or run some high powered venture.

I thought I had met one such spouse at Justice Stevens' retirement, may he rest in peace, which was attended by nearly all of the justice's many former clerks.  An older couple walked up to my wife, who was clerking for the justice at the time, introduced themselves and the lady said "I'm doing this and that and legal work for such and such" and her husband said, "and I work at Home Depot."  I was elated to finally find a normal spouse with a normal job until my wife whispered to me, "he's the CEO of Home Depot."  And as it turns out, he was the former clerk.  All this is to say that people with my wife's legal credentials don't normally provide their expertise to the military despite the allure of regular PT tests, software that doesn't work, and idiotic CBTs.  I would not be surprised to learn that my wife is the only clerk to wear a uniform.

All that is well and good but it may not illustrate my point as well as the free market can, since it places a monetary figure on competence.  Show me the money, to include yet another sports reference in this blog post.  So consider then that law school graduates, from the nation's top law schools, hope to get an interview with the biggest and most lucrative law firms.  But that's not so with the top graduates of the top law schools who become Supreme Court clerks.  Rather those same law firms hope that they will get granted a chance to be interviewed by the clerk.  And if the firm is able to convince the clerk to join their ranks, those firms pay the young lawyers a standard signing bonus with no contract attached.  The Supreme Court clerk bonus these days is about a half a million dollars.  For just agreeing to take a job.  It may not be what the Bulls pay for top talent, but it's in the same ball park.  Or basketball court.

So that was the caliber of officer that my wife's NPC boss thought needed to be "challenged."  What an utterly ridiculous attempt to destroy my wife's military career.  Not just illustrated by my wife's been-there-done-that wartime experience in an Air Force career field that actually mattered.  Not even best illustrated by her gilded academic credentials, the circles she travels in, or the fact that her legal skills are highly prized and compensated in the real legal profession.  Rather, the absolute idiocy of that former JAG boss is better demonstrated by the fact that, my wife is insanely competent, hard working, caring, and inexplicably (at least to my raised-in-a-trailer-park mind) humble and down to earth.  You'll have to take my word for this one, I can't provide a Wiki link or an article from the New York Times for this assertion.  But if you were to meet her, you'd never equate her with the picture I have just painted because she would never mention such things.  She probably won't even like this blog post (update: confirmed, she doesn't, which means she joins the ranks of a great many other O-6s who also don't like what I write here).  But if you spoke with her and her accomplishments were to somehow come up, you wouldn't get even the faintest impression of superiority or arrogance.  Because she truly doesn't see herself that way.  When I first met her I thought her demeanor must have been calculated and that she just behaved that way for social acceptance knowing that people would be quick to judge her for going to a fancy school (a joke of an institution that evokes an entirely different kind of righteous judgment these days).  But I was wrong about that and after nearly two decades of being hitched, I can attest that she hasn't got an ounce of pretension in her.  It's truly astonishing.

Her blend of incredible competence, work ethic, and concern for others coupled with this utterly humble demeanor, is no doubt why she has been so prized by commanders throughout her career, and why her military accolades include being Distinguished Graduate (DG) from every Air Force school she has attended, and number one ratings on most of her performance reports up until that point when a worthless, utterly disgraceful, Air Force JAG slapped her with a push line intended to inflict unjustified and undeserved damage.

But that push line failed to deliver its intended effect, the USAFR elevated competence within its ranks, and I now have a reason to update this blog with rare positive news about our military.

But now I have to get off the computer.  A full bird Colonel is nearly done making my breakfast.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

The Department of Defense Purposefully & Deceptively Blocks Retirees From Accessing Medical & Other Benefits


 

We can go ahead and chalk this up to "conspiracy theory" that perhaps later somebody will get around to proving is true.  Regardless, it's true.  Whenever it comes to the federal government doing shady and illegal shit to fuck over ordinary Americans, to include veterans, it's always true.

The military is purposefully putting up digital road blocks and circular loops, as has been practiced by horrible companies for some time now, in order to deny military retirees their benefits.  Log in to check for a medical appointment one day, the next day you have to verify your identity using some insane metric.  What do you mean you don't remember the correct image out of the hundreds you were told to select as part of your authentication?  You don't remember picking that image, randomly given to you as though it was supposed to mean something memorably in a way the hundreds of other images didn't?  Well, we don't know it's you anymore so you can't check your GI Bill benefits or log into the VA portal.

Never fret though, we have a "remote proofing" procedure we have established to figure out who you are.  It's really simple.  First, you take a picture of your passport or some non-military ID identification.  Military ID, obviously, is the last form of identification to be used to determine you're retired military, duh.  So throw in some State driver's license.  Then, take a selfie.  Press the submit button, we'll wait a minute, then we'll tell you that our system couldn't verify you.  Maybe it was the lighting.  You can try again.  Once you've tried and failed four times, and you will, then you'll be locked out for a month.  We have a phone number you may be able to find if you do some research.  Don't forget to choose Option 7 and wait for nobody to answer.

According to this (I know, I know) Business Insider article, the DoD (led by the guy who thinks white supremacy is the biggest threat to America) has been hiring private companies (not Facebook or Twitter, different companies that come with the same plausible deniability) to perform "remote proofing."  And, according to that article, at least one company has been purposefully ensuring retirees are unable to get verified in the system.  While they suffer from medical ailments that need treatment.

From the article:

HELP! I am trying to apply for health benefits as well as the financial benefits for my 90-year-old father who has Alzheimer's and is also a veteran. He is unable to do the application himself and ... I can't verify his identity through ID me.

While it appears that company has been replaced, the same methods are still being employed to deny American retirees their benefits.  And this is a tactic that is being used by other government organizations also trying to save a buck when it comes to people's medical expenses.

While veteran suicides skyrocket and retirees die more quickly due to the purposeful roadblocks enacted by their government to ensure they can't timely access benefits that might assist them with burn pit ailments, you can be assured that this same government will be eyeing your retirement check even beyond what they've stolen from you through inflation.

To be fair though, if the government didn't get creative at stealing money from its own citizens, how would it be able to fund the pensions of those in Ukraine?


Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Adam Kinzinger, the Domestic Enemy of our Oath


He did it because he's an enemy of the American people and of America.  Bolstered by the un-American propaganda that has been flowing in our military officer ranks for decades and which is facilitated frequently on the forum you find yourself on by your colleagues (which until recently included the Congressmen himself).  Some of your other colleagues, before it became unfashionable, sung the praises of Kinzinger.  They may have changed their tune, but they still share his values.  That's to say nothing of the usual suspects on the forum who might as well be preaching from the Communist authoritarian hymnal.  Military officers.  And their choir is growing.

Anti-American propaganda coupled with careerist carrots has destroyed the character of our military and our federal government and of the American people as a whole regardless of professed politics.  The dumbing down of the population through the takeover of our education system by propagandists hasn't helped (see your colleague BashiChuni trying to talk sense to "educated" morons for reference).

The federal government is the enemy of the American people and our military has been a faithful tool in its treason for decades if not longer.  Why is it so obvious now?  Because there is little need for pretense in the arena we find ourselves in anymore.  The American people are vulnerable, weakened, and easily conquered.  Peoples throughout history have been conquered because they couldn't see how the weapons of warfare had changed, they clung on to the old ways.  It's the same today as people say "come and take it" and build up their ammo stores.  We are in an incredibly different world from 1776, those who own our government know it, and there really isn't much need to pretend anymore.  So enemies from within, like Adam Kinzinger, don't fear the little secret getting out that they hate our nation and our citizenry and use our taxpayer funded machinery against us.

We had a chance to avoid this.  While the usual suspects censored and demonized American voices and asked "what are you doing except posting online," the reality is that our voices were the only chance we had.  Most of us didn't use them.  Now we can't use them in any effective way.  And it will get worse from here.

All perfectly forseeable while our government and military was using our taxpayer money to murder Americans without charge or trial outside war zones (to the cheers of most of your digital officer colleagues).  And while our government was using our money to spy on us and to pass laws giving the POTUS the unconstitutional power to use the military to arrest any of us, citizen or not, in America without charge or trial and imprison us indefinitely.  And now we know it uses our taxpayer money to have us censored online (your forum likely does it for free, they're good like that in the bro network).

Murder, imprison, silence.  All without due process or a jury of peers.

So what's left before the cultists pronounce the reality of our situation?  Does the POTUS need to come out with a crown on his head?  The answer is that they want it.  They love exercising force over other people on both the so-called "left" and "right."  America cannot survive in that environment and it has not.  What our nation has become has been so very evident for a long time now.  There isn't a fascist despot in history who wouldn't give a thumbs up with envy at what our rulers have achieved over us with the aid of technology that is far deadlier to freedom and democracy than any Panzer division or gunpowder illuminating the face of a puzzled Aztec.  But it really doesn't matter at this point.  We're way beyond bingo fuel.

We don't live in the world of Red Dawn.  It's over.  We had our chance and we passed it up.  The experiment has ended.  There will be no getting out of the overt tyranny that will continue to increase far beyond the insane levels we just went through.  Once the Central Bank Digital Currency is released, it's a wrap, and life will start to look much more like the old history books except in color.  So, if you're still serving, honor your oath and accept the consequences.  Otherwise, just enjoy the show, wait for your ticket onto the train and consider, if you have children, what your action or inaction has meant for their lives.

Adam Kinzinger isn't the exception.  He's the rule.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Contacted Again by the Fiasco Podcast Folks


I have previously blogged about being contacted by the Fiasco folks here.  This morning I got another email from Leon Neyfakh.  The subject line was "Brandon Bryant" and the message read:

Dear Rick,


I hope you are well. Last week I interviewed a sensor operator named Brandon Bryant. I am wondering if you might agree to speak to me, off-the-record, about your experience with him. I just need to know how to assess some of the things he told me. 

I would be most grateful for your help. 
Leon
 
I responded:
 
What I will tell you about Brandon Bryant is that he is a mythomaniac and he is severely mentally ill.  So whatever claims he's making about me (and he has a habit of making false claims about me), if you simply require him to provide evidence for his claims that should prove helpful.  If he cannot, then they're false claims.  Sadly Bryant is adept at finding "journalists" who don't require evidence and who don't ask follow up questions.

You can feel free to share with me what claims he's made about me and I'll consider responding.

You might also want to check out: https://youtu.be/HDU9Icy_E9wk

And also: https://youtu.be/y8gO1jBykPY

Cheers.
 
I followed that up with this response:

While hopefully you won't sacrifice your podcast's credibility by including Brandon Bryant in it, here is another video you may find useful.  It'sf Bryant talking about me.  You might consider his claims in this video while evaluating whatever claims he has made about me now in case it's useful.  Cheers.

https://youtu.be/NqOn-9uDUPY


19 Feb 23 Update:

Leon followed up with another email stating:

Hi Rick,

Thanks for your response -- writing you back from my work email to keep things straight. 


Brandon actually didn't mention you by name in our interview. He did talk about someone he referred to as "the major," who he says informed him of the order to kill al-Awlaki. According to Brandon, the major said he believed the order was unconstitutional because the target was an American citizen.

This struck me as something you could provide context for. Having watched the video you sent, and the longer documentary you posted, I'm hoping to convince you to speak with me by phone or video chat. (You would be free to record the conversation even if you don't want me to use it in our podcast.)

My purpose here is to figure out, as best I can, how the killing of al-Awlaki happened, and to better understand the events that led up to it.

Leon

 I responded:

"He did talk about someone he referred to as "the major," who he says informed him of the order to kill al-Awlaki."

If Bryant was referring to me, then he made a false claim.

It's possible he is referring to some unidentified "flight operations supervisor" that he claims, in a TedX talk, told him that.  See 20:43 in this video: https://youtu.be/HDU9Icy_E9w?t=1243

I was not Bryant's "flight operations supervisor" and have never had a physical conversation with Bryant.

I suspect the story Bryant tells in his TedX talk is made up, but you could simply ask him to name the "flight operations supervisor" he was referring to if you want to track down the veracity of his claim.

You should have more than enough information to make it clear that Bryant is a serial liar who makes up claims, but if you choose to investigate his claims, simply require him to provide evidence for them.  Good luck.

 Leon responded:


Thanks Rick. Sounds like you're not the person he's talking about. 


Is there anything you'd be willing to tell me about your own experience being ordered to target an American citizen?

I responded:

As I stated previously, I am not interested in participating in your podcast but I wish you the best with your journalism.  It's an important discussion.

Leon responded:

Can I ask you why you don't want to participate? I accept your decision, I just want to understand it... 

I did not respond.  He then followed up with:

Haha, just saw your blog post. Hello to all your readers! If any of them want to help me, I'll await their outreach :)


If any of my two, possibly three on a busy day, readers want to assist with this story, Leon is easy to find on Twitter.

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Welcome back JR!



For more than a decade now, one of my favorite contributors over on the BaseOps.Net forum has been GearPig.  He typically offers reasoned views and has a decent enough head on his shoulders.  He's a bit too responsive to bad actor pressures that lead him to practice the conformity he no doubt disdains, and he goes off the deep end every once in awhile culminating in some wild accusations of various online identities being me, going "underground" in a frenzied panic via a name change and other spectacular antics, but his offered views are often value added so I appreciate his voice on social media.

If you want an interesting chit chat over coffee, or a riling forum discussion, the newly dubbed GearHog is your guy as he has an uncommon level of intelligence and an operational bullshit-meter.  But intelligence isn't what makes a good military officer.  Rather, what makes a good military officer (or any public servant) is intelligence combined with principle.  Principle is best demonstrated by courage.

Having some "correct" views that challenge the herd may be fun for discussion and might stroke one's ego in a debate, but it's acting courageously for what is right that makes a good military officer.  Most military pilots are intelligent in comparison to society at large.  They can tie their shoes, they can read good, they can take tests.  But few are principled.  While they mouth their oaths of office and obey commands to salute symbols they don't understand or actually value, the vast majority haven't thought deeply about what America actually is (the idea that they are paid to make more real) and they don't really care about their country.  They want a paycheck, they want a fun job, and they want people to see them in uniform and credit them with all the character they don't actually possess.  And there it ends.

They are herd animals.  Worse, they are herd animals who think they are the best of the best.  As a result, people with a bit more intelligence like GearPig are able to take them to task fairly easily.

If only America's defense were a forum thread debate like the heavily censored BaseOps.Net.  But it's not.  It requires much more than being right on the Internets.  You can admire those who venture where you dare not tread, but your admiration of your betters is also not good enough.

America is critically injured and dying.  And cowardice by those entrusted with her defense is the dagger in her back.



Thursday, February 2, 2023

The Good Ole USA - a Satelite of China

 

While hundreds of American citizens in Montana are herded like cattle, scanned, and groped in Department of Homeland Security airport lines that infringe on their constitutional rights, overhead is a Chinese spy balloon on its days long trip overhead our nation's ICBM facilities.

Our government could have shot the craft down before it entered our airspace, but it didn't.  It could have gotten on the phone and made it clear to China that it would remove its spy balloon immediately.  But it didn't do that either.

General Milley, our nation's ranking military member, certainly has Communist China's phone number since he used it to conspire with their military to thwart a sitting President of the United States and any potential nuclear strike that President might make.  Despite General Milley's literal treason, he was not reprimanded and is still at the helm of our military.

Biden will do as he does, and talk a good game that doesn't comport with his actions.  He has serious financial ties to China and his loyalties are less divided than they are non-existent when it comes to America.  Likewise, many politicians in both parties are purchased by China just as multitudes of business leaders are.  These politicians, like bureaucrats in our nation's institutes of higher learning, work tirelessly on behalf of China to implement policies that weaken our nation militarily, economically, and socially.

The spy balloon is just the latest action by China to make it obvious who is in control of who.  While our politicians still talk a good game and play tough, just as Democrats and Republicans pretend to oppose one another while walking hand in hand, they are merely playing to the dumbest among us who still don't get it.  Much as our installed "leaders" in foreign nations would talk a good game about being against policies of the United States to appease their masses, while dutifully moving as the puppet master required.

The United States has been conquered by China.  We are a mere puppet nation.  A satellite.  We are a Made-in-China-America that was defeated from the inside in a fifth generation war combined with good old fashioned dollar diplomacy.  Our decision makers and power base was purchased, and the rest of us have been programmed with the over-confidence we love so much, the pom-pom patriotism and cheap plastic pride in our nation and we have been conditioned to see our rights and liberty as a threat (whether the ability to freely speak, or keep and bear arms, or protest) and we have been inundated with the notion that the majority in our nation are bad because of their skin color, and that criticizing non-white nations is racism.

We have been encouraged to degrade our nation's ability to produce energy, our food production, and told that every conceivable physical or taste difference between us is paramount.  Our ability to speak has been controlled and censored as is done in China, protestors have been arrested and locked away without due process for having anti-government views as is done in China, and the armed-components of our government are increasingly used against citizens to punish dissent.  Our nation has been divided, splintered, plundered, and conquered.  From the inside on behalf of the outside.

The fact that a hostile nation's spy balloon continues for days above a key piece of our nuclear triad makes this perfectly clear.  That would have never happened at any other time in America's history when it was an independent nation comprised of people who valued freedom.  That it is happening now while few take it seriously, to include active serving military officers, is just one more indicator of our failed nation.

The United States of America no longer exists and hasn't for some time now.  It has never been more obvious than it is today.