The Military's Heavy Hand

Below is a link to a blog that I would read every once in a while. He was a military recruiter and would write about his every day experiences as a recruiter.

Well, he shut his blog down because the military was trying to find out who he was.

They can't find Bin Laden but oh well. Better spend some time looking for this guy.

Isn't it ironic that the USA is at war with whomever to defend liberty, justice and the American way but SGT blogger is in fear of the Army because of his free speech?

Yes he is violating some Army reg but let's get real. Hello, free speech?

The military is a very weird place with very weird rules that aren't even remotely enforced fairly or uniformly. I should know after 24 years in some version of the military. See, even I won't tell you what I do. Actually I am in charge of finding Bin Laden. But there's so much Must See TV. Read his last post below.

Wait! I have to tell you one of the most rediculous stories of USAF hypocrisy.

When I was a LT in the USAF, the MAJs and Lt Cols all had a swingers, wife swapping club. Not to mention that most of the higher ups were sleeping with the female students. We did have one guy who was sleeping with a male student. That is another story.

Anyway, with all of this adultery going on, there is this 2LT kid who is in pilot training. He lives in an apartment next to a newly married couple. Everday after the husband went to work, the wife would come over to LT Smith's house and open her robe and show him her stuff. He refuses on multiple occasions but finally after weeks of this the 22 year old LT has had enough and does what he has to do.

Eventually the husband finds out and calls the Wing Commander on base and wants to know why the student pilots of his base are having sex with his wife.

They throw the kid out of pilot training and the USAF and almost put him in prison.

He's out and the wife swapping among the higher ups continues!


http://recruiterconfession.blogspot.com/


All Good Things Must Come To an End
Well folks, I was hoping I didn't have to write this post - but all good things must come to an end.

As of today, May 5th, 2006, I am officially shutting down my blog. There are two reasons I must do so and I feel that I should explain them to my faithful readers.

There is no reason that is the "one" reason, but added together I felt it is time.

First of all, there are certin commands out there that do NOT want me to blog. In doing some research (OK, asking some people - some friends in high places and two reporter friends of mine) I have found out that they have been trying very hard to find out who I am and shut me down. At first I thought it was kind of funny, but realized that I really don't want to end my military career over a blog - it has gotten THAT bad! To the people who want me shut down, you win. I don't know if I posed a threat to you, or if I posted words you did not approve of, or what I did to cause you to hunt me down, but I'm sorry if I have damaged the service that I have dedicated my life to. My intentions were never to harm anyone, only to show a corner of the world many people are not privy to.

Second of all you have probably noticed that I have not posted in a while. Part of it is because I was evaluating if I wanted this blog to continue or not. The other part of it is because there is a lot going on in my life. Trying to post to the blog is another part of my to-do list that keeps getting longer and longer every day. I have been evaluating my life recently and realized something's got to change - I am adding some things to enhance my life, but at the same time some things have to go. In this evaluation I decided that the blog had to go.

I would like to thank the many readers I have and appologise that I am taking my blog down. Hopefully I have helped some people out during my time here as a blogger. I am going to go through all emails (one thing that has been pushed aside) and try and help out anybody who has emailed me. I am also going to keep the email address open for a while to help advise people for a while longer. If you want to you can feel free to email me as much as you want.

Again, thank you and goodbye

"See you on the other side"
-Recruiter

The Police and Fundraising

I just got a call from the Georgia State Trooper Fraternal Order of Police.

He wanted me to give them money so that they can buy bullet proof vests.

What?

I very politely told him no thank you and goodbye, but he continued and I said no thank you goodbye again and hung up on him.

First, I pay a fortune in taxes. That should buy plenty of bullet proof vests.

Second, don't call me at home. I have no idea who you really are. Send me a letter.

And I'm watching TV, I don't have time for such trivialities as a bullet proof vest.

Oprah might say something profound.

And third, when you stop pulling over normal people for going 10 miles over the speed limit just to raise money

Or when you start to only pull over the nuts that are driving reckless. And there's plenty of them

AND when you too Mr. Trooper decide to obey the traffic laws like the rest of us then call me back.

Bush and the Troops

I've got a some great pictures to put on here if I can ever figure out how to get them out of my phone. They relate to the troops.

Anyway.

Everybody knows this but I still have to say something.

After Bush's ratings suck and the elections are coming up, what does the dingbat in chief do?

He's going to bring a bunch of troops home.

Now isn't that convenient.

How does he sleep at night playing chess with people's lives for political reasons.

And does he really think that we are that stupid?

Eveidently so.

The Latest Co-Pilot

OK...this one really blew me off my chair.

I was telling him about one of my friends who can make friends anywhere, anytime. He is very outgoing.

Mr. Co-Pilot said, "you know, I'm not really interested at all in other people".

HA!

Now that is a really funny thing to say.

First it's really sad and second he doesn't even know how weird it sounded.

Of course, after he told me how he had just cheated on his girlfriend of 6.5 years it didn't surprise me.

He had no concern for her or her feelings....just what he wanted to do...which goes back to his original comment above

How Are Old Men Made?

I was listening to an aquaintance of mine talk the other day. I've known him for 25 years. From the USAF days.

He used to be cool. Now he sounds like an old man.

How did that happen?

Now granted, if you still talk like a 16 year old at 45 you will sound like a moron.

But, he was grunting and puffing and saying really old things. It's hard to explain.

It's like Henry Kissinger. I wonder if he ever talked like a kid or did he always sound like he was 100 years old.

I wonder if I sound old. I probably do and don't even realize it.

Melvin

On a recent layover on Santa Monica Beach I met Melvin.

Melvin is a homeless guy. Melvin is also insane.

I passed him while walking and then passed him again about two hours later.

He was in the same spot.

This time I made eye contact with him and he asked me for $1. I said sure and gave him $1. Why homeless people ask for $1 and not more is beyond me. Maybe that is what usually works.

Anyway, as soon as I gave him the money he started talking nonstop.

He told me that on this very spot that he saw Dr. Martin Luther King assinated right there on the beach. Melvin saw it. He also told me that he was Diana Ross's love child and that he was the first black woman in America. He was. Also, Melvin said that God did not like us going into space and that he prayed in tongues every night while he did kareoke. Oh by the way. Did I know that he was Diana Ross's love child.

It was fascinating. There is no way a sane person could even remotely be able to go as fast and as long as he did about all of these crazy unrelated things.

Melvin is insane.

He's not lazy or a bum. He is insane.

So why does our society take better care of whales that wash ashore than Melvin?

Melvin is one of us. A human being. People pass him like he is a lamp post.

I always try to make eye contact with the homeless and at least say hello.

I also am very much for personal freedom. If you are sane and don't want to work and wander around all day and sleep in the bushes, I guess that is your right.

But Melvin isn't making that choice. He doesn't even know what planet he is on.

Why aren't we taking care of Melvin? I don't get it.

The guy down the way past Melvin was so disturbed that he just talked to himself. All the time. Other people screamed at whatever hallucination they were having at the time.

There's a big difference between someone who has fallen on hard times and is homeless and someone who has the mental capacity of a 2 year old.

Angelina is over in Africa helping them. I think that's great. But we sure so have a lot of people over here who need our help too.

About 15 minutes into his talking, I said Melvin, excuse me, can I interupt you. Sure he said. I said, I'm sorry but I need to catch my bus. And I did. It was time to go. He said are you on a tour. I said no, I'm going downtown. He said no problem, he had a bus to catch too.

With that, Melvin went silent, sat down, and went back into his world in his head.

Your Mother's Maiden Name

By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
June 12, 2006 issue - I used to hear strange clicking sounds on my telephone and assume it was Verizon's usual level of service. Now I figure it's the National Security Agency. When USA Today broke the news that the Feds were tracking the phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans, allegedly in the interest of combating terrorism, apologists insisted that no one was listening in on individual calls. Except maybe for those calls made to foreign countries. I imagine transcripts of my many long and frustrating conversations with tech-service representatives based in India.

And yet there has been little outrage about what is essentially domestic spying, the notion that the same phone companies that cannot manage to get an installer to arrive on time nevertheless effortlessly turned over to the government the records of most households and businesses. Maybe people believe swapping personal data for national security is a fair trade. But maybe no one is agitated because the notion of privacy has become, like Atlantis, a persistent and attractive myth. The sad thing is that that's not so much because the government has invaded our privacy, but because we thoughtlessly gave it away bit by bit.

In the morning the ATM screen greets me: "Hello, Anna Quindlen!" The woman on the phone from J. Crew asks for the supersecret security code from the back of my Visa card. The credit-card company needs my date and place of birth and the last four digits of my Social Security number. Somewhere in computers there is a record of the books I've read, the music I like and the places outside the United States I've visited. A Web site even allows well-informed strangers to see how much I paid for my house and how much I might be able to get for it today. Add the satellite photos Google Earth provides, and you can peer at my roof. (When the resolution gets a little higher, everyone will know that the climbing hydrangea in the backyard is struggling.)

Luckily I am too old to be saddled with a Facebook profile. Facebook is a hugely popular site for college students in which they post pictures of themselves and their friends and describe their personalities, interests and even sexual preferences in what one expert has described as "egocasting." But students are beginning to see the downside of the site, and it's not just that way too many folks wind up knowing you appreciate, in the words of one profile, "being intoxicated, dancing all over the place, underwear shopping, electrical tape." Some colleges have announced they will discipline students whose Facebook entries show them engaged in underage drinking or illicit drug use. Others have warned that prospective employers are trolling Facebook, and that when they have a choice between the applicant pictured in his boxers hoisting a beer bong and the one who is not, they are likely to hire the latter.

A man powers up his cell phone as a plane grinds to a halt and begins to have a business conversation beginning with the words "This is all under the cone of silence." Dozens of people listen in on just-between-us. It used to be that if you were stupid enough to give your boyfriend a picture of you in your underwear, he'd show it around to his dopey friends. Today he might post it online, and before you can say "pink lace," guys are looking at it in Boston, Brasília and Beijing.

We've given away our personal information, our predilections, our secrets, even our shame, during transactions, conversations and Internet exchanges. Maybe the notion that the government is keeping track of our phone records feels like just more of the same. It is indeed an outrage, that the big phone companies serve customers so poorly and the authorities so cravenly, that the so-called war on terrorism is so ineptly waged that billions of pages of numbers seemed like a useful tool. We can never forget that these were the same folks who intercepted two messages from Afghanistan on Sept. 10, 2001: "the match begins tomorrow" and "tomorrow is zero hour." No one understood except in hindsight, but hindsight was the only way the messages were seen. They weren't translated until Sept. 12, and zero hour had come and gone.

When it was reported recently that the Social Security numbers of more than 26 million veterans were up for grabs after someone stole the laptop of a government employee, it turned out that the theft was the old-fashioned kind, a jimmied window, a snatch-and-grab. But lots of current burglary is cybertech stuff, pulling ATM numbers off convenience-store computers, hacking into databases loaded with personal information. If these were conventional household crimes, the thieves could say truthfully that the doors and windows were left open, the loot in plain sight. That's what Americans do every day. It seems quaint to think of Orwell's futuristic novel and its warning that Big Brother was watching. Now 1984 is the past, not the future, and things have changed. There are many big brothers watching out there, and we're vamping for them every day. Sometimes in our underwear.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek

World Cup Football aka Soccer...Who Cares?

The World Cup Soccer whatever is going on in Germany right now.

I fly with sports crazed guys all the time. Not one of them has mentioned the world cup.

Usually, they can talk ad nauseum about football, basketball, almost any sport.

And they ask me, did you see Shaq hit that shot last night? I say, is that the game with the big orange ball and a basket of some kind?

Anyway, the media is all over this world cup thing. But in my interaction with passengers and crew and anybody else, I don't see Americans as caring at all.

So why is the media on it.

I think it's some kind of guilt thing.

Like trying to get the country to go metric in the 70s. Nobody cared about that either.

I think that the media feels that we are silly or something because every other country in the world loves soccer and we don't care. So they are going to try to educate us and get us to like it.

Ain't going to happen. Same with rugby, cricket, etc.

Now the one game you could get to catch on here would be having a coliseum and throwing people to the lions.

I bet that would sell out.

Atlanta Traffic Russian Roulette

A friend of mine was driving to work in Atlanta the other day during rush hour. Atlanta traffic on I-75, a 6 lane interstate each way, maybe more, frequently goes from 80 to zero in a matter of seconds.

Behind him was a lady in a Honda putting on her makeup.

So he sees that, gets over in the other lane, and about 1/2 a mile ahead, the traffic stops and she goes about 60 mph into the truck in front of her.

Coming home from work the other day, I'm on the interstate going through town, also 6 lanes each way, and there she is. In the middle lane, completely stopped.

Your car doesn't just stop immediately. It has some momentum and you surely can get the piece of junk off of the road. Nope. She's sitting in the car, in the middle of 6 lanes, waiting to get killed.

I missed her and the cars behind me were swerving all over. I'm sure that it was just a matter of time before the inevitable happened.

So what's going on? I feel helpless. Just waiting to be maimed.

I've been in two wrecks in 6 months.

It's crazy.

Another co-pilot story

Well this one has been married twice now.

One kid from each marriage.

Wife two and him weren't really getting along.

And it was very clear her level of distaste for him when he came home from a trip and the house was empty.

She took it all. Except for his clothes, a table and a couch.

Now that would really make me angry to where I might do something that would not be good.

Boy that would tick me off.

And he still talks to her on the phone. Of course they fight. I heard every word.

What is there to talk about? She screwed him. Next topic please.

But being the male that he is, he did get a flight attendant's phone number on one of our flights so he can start working on wife number 3.

I think I would take a break for just a little while.

What has happened to me?

I'm not sure what happened, but this is definately not like me.

They caught these terrorists in Canada who were going to blow everything up.

Now when I saw them on TV and heard about it, my initial reaction was that they should set a date and broadcast on TV them putting a bullet in each one of their heads.

And do it like 3 days after they caught them.

With a big sign behind them, "dear terrorists, don't &*^! with us".

Where did that come from?

I am a liberal wacko nut.

Usually.

I think I'm just tired of it and want these dirtbags to get what they deserve.

Or maybe it's because it's over here and not over there.

And they were caught red handed.

And I still feel that way.

The Al Brothers

Well, one of the Al brothers was killed.

Al-Zar-Car-Wee. Or whatever his name was. Two 500 lb bombs did him in. Good.

I call him one of the Al brothers because that is what we called the Arabs that we were in training with in the USAF.

I was in this one USAF school and there were also some Saudi Arabian students.

Each day we would have a morning briefing at a certain time. All of the instructors and students would gather in the flight room at the appointed time and brief the weather, safety, whatever.

The time was different each day depending on the flight schedule. When the briefing was over, you were basically free to do whatever until you flew.

So, the deal was that they were trying to treat us like pilots and not like the students that we were a few months ago in pilot training. If you were late for a briefing in pilot training you were dead meat. But since they were going to treat us like adults, now that we were pilots, the deal was this.

If you were late to the morning brief, you had to bring donuts.

Very rarely was anyone late. If ever. Even with the donut deal.

But one day, the Al brothers were very late.

Their names all start with Al. Get it?

Anyway, they come blasting in about 3 hours late.

The instructors go where the &^%* have you been? You're three hours late?

One of the Al brothers says, no problem my friend, we bring donuts!

And in comes one of them with about 20 dozen donuts. They all were happy with themselves that they had done the right thing.

And they figured that the later you were the more donuts you should bring.

The sight of Al-Salamabob walking in with donuts stacked to the ceiling was hysterical.