PSA about E15 gasoline…
On a good bad scale, this ain’t good as they say…
Assuming they ONLY work an 8 hour day, seven days a week, the average E-4 is making $8.92/hr for being responsible for a $55.2M F/A-18 E/F…
A brown shirt is a plane captain, e.g. responsible for care/feeding of the acft when the pilot isn’t flying it. He cleans it, makes sure it’s full of oil, fuel and hydraulic fluid, makes sure the weapons get loaded, make sure the maintainers fixed all the gripes, and does this day after day.
As I was warned, sooner or later somebody would really dislike The Grey Man…
Well, the wait is over… I got a 1 star, probably because they didn’t go any lower. It was titled “Cliche after cliche.”
The story was disjointed and confusing. The characters were all very 1 dimensional. The men, except for the main character, were all insecure and unsure of themselves, and the women all talked and acted like men.
So be it… Now that’s over and done with… In other news, I’ve gotten a few overseas sales in Australia, England and a couple of other places. Thank you to those folks!
And just as a counter-point, Aaron the Shekel put up his review HERE…
And thank you to those who have read and commented! I appreciate it!
Saturday I was over at the MCX at Henderson Hall and got to chatting with a retired Master Gunny… The discussion came around to what is true today. And that is a damn good question… First- In the interest of honesty, I’ve been guilty myself of not fact checking stuff before I’ve thrown something out there. Dammit…
What got the whole discussion going was apparently he’d just met the fiance of his grand-daughter and the guy was a liberal who almost didn’t shake his hand when he found out the Gunny had been in Vietnam and was proud of it, telling the Gunny that we’d been the aggressor and committed all kinds of atrocities. When the Gunny asked him where he’d gotten that BS, the guy said that’s what he’d learned at Columbia, and that the Gunny didn’t ‘understand’ the big picture… The Gunny said he got up and walked out at that point…
truth
tro͞oTH/
noun
-
the quality or state of being true.“he had to accept the truth of her accusation”
- that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.
noun: the truth “tell me the truth
3. a fact or belief that is accepted as true.
plural noun: truths “the emergence of scientific truths”
Origin- Middle English trewthe, from Old English trēowth fidelity; akin to Old English trēowe faithful
Sadly, finding the ‘truth’ today can be and often is an exercise in futility… Everybody points to the Interwebz and says, “Oh I’ve got the link right here and it’s (whatever). Lots of folks then go ‘Oh, okay, there’s a reference, so it must be true…
The BIG issue with the net is that it is GIGO (garbage in-garbage out). There are no unbiased fact checkers… Not Snopes, not Urban Legends, nada…
If you don’t do the hard work and analysis to decide if that IS actually a truth supported by references that you checked yourself, that YOU are comfortable with (at least for it’s validity), you’re spinning your wheels. And if you believe pretty much anything that you see from .gov well… Much less anything you take for granted from a MSM outlet in a 30 second sound bite.
Wiki-whatever is even worse… ANYBODY can make any change they want to any Wiki entry…
As one who grew up with hard copy books, yeah those big heavy awkward things that sat in the bookcases and had words like Encyclopedia Britannica…
And two volumes of Webster’s Dictionary when there was a word I didn’t know…
EXACTLY like this set… But I digress… We believed what we read, because of two things, first- The entries were fact checked by numerous people, and real scientists were consulted IN THEIR AREA OF EXPERTISE for entries… Second- These were neither cheap nor routinely changed.
Once an entry went in, it stayed until there was overwhelming evidence it was wrong or outdated. You could also get ‘yearly’ books that updated things that had gone on in the previous year.
Time, Newsweek, and other magazines had articles that were fact checked, and references could be gotten by contacting the organization/university/or whomever was involved.
I can remember writing the British Museum back when I was in the 7th or 8th grade about the Rosetta Stone and actually getting a rather extensive monograph back from them…
Contrast that with today- Media is ‘fluid’… What you see in hard copy may or may not be available online. Research today is often ‘sponsored’ by organizations or individuals looking for a particular answer, or set of statistics… The advent of supercomputers and parallel processing have made it possible to keep changing stats by varying the values until you get what you want… And do that in hours… Peer and ‘scientific’ review have become by and large a pay to play scheme, again with people who have vested interest in specific answers. Revisionist historians have also played havoc, especially with anything having to do with war, disasters, and anything not considered PC today…
And the generations today are known as the sound bite generations for good reason. They don’t read, literacy is down, and the ‘communication’ seems to consist of mostly texts, tweets, instagrams, and whatever the new latest thing is…
What’s a person to do? My suggestion is digging in and doing your own fact checking. It’s not fast, it’s usually not pretty, but you can learn some interesting things along the way. And you may even find that elusive truth out there…
This one is believed to be attributed to Carl Shreve.
It was done as a 1943 recruiting poster and ‘may’ have been a one off for Mr. Shreve. Not much is known about him, but apparently he traveled extensively prior to and after WWII doing paintings and articles.
Sorry for the lack of info.
Today is Armed Forces Day. I took a little time and went over to the MCX and shook a few hands.
It’s too bad our leadership expects this of the military, yet they themselves refuse to do anything to support the services… 18% of the budget, 47% of the cuts, and getting worse…
I’ve kinda stayed away from the VA debacle until now, since I classify as partially disabled, but after hearing what I did last night, I’m pissed… (I have been waiting since Feb for scheduling of my appointment, which now appears to be June 5th)…
First, it now appears that ALL of the VA hospitals have been playing games with wait times in a pay (we pay) to play (they play and get bonuses) scheme that it appears at least some in the VA hierarchy have know about since at least 2010. And there is a bunch of ‘fluff’ media coverage about Petzel ‘retiring’ in the wake of the scandal…
Little issue, he was already SCHEDULED to retire, and the administration has already nominated a replacement… Article HERE. He’s just leaving a couple of months early…
The IG can’t do a credible job of investigation of anything more than ‘maybe’ one hospital, much less EVERY ONE (which is needed)… Apparently there have already been documents shredded in Phoenix, in relation to the ‘probe’, so credible is already questionable…
And Holder has apparently said yesterday that DOJ will ‘wait’ for a further determination… WTF???
How about pulling the FBI off investigating Christie and the other Pub governors, and put their asses to work investigating this? It’s not like they are going to be sent to investigate F&F or Benghazi…
This ‘should’ be investigated (IMHO) as a criminal investigation, since at least 40 and possibly as many as 100 people have DIED! OH, but wait, we know what they think of that and us veterans don’t we… What was it Hildabitch said? Oh yeah, “What DIFFERENCE does it make?”
But, in ‘other’ news, ‘Bradley’ Manning is being sent to a civilian hospital from prison for hormone therapy… Article HERE. I would have no problem with Manning getting this IF it was after the last vet in line for treatment has been taken care of… NOT before…
I guess traitors with better lawyers are more important to the administration and attack LGBT and whatever else groups than Veterans who have given more than anyone else to protect this country…
Kicking the soap box back in the corner and looking for my BP meds… sigh
So I’ve been out at a conference meeting cluster**** for the last week…
Tasker- Revive dead horse by Thursday.
Funding- $0
Equipment- Zero
Direction- None
Number of committees- Seven
The only ‘good’ thing is a chance to catch up with some old friends. But the thing that really brought this home was a bunch of us went to dinner on Thursday night, and got to talking BSing (well actually telling sea stories that were verifiable, because more than one of us had been there…)
One of the ladies got curious as to how long we’d known each other, because, in her words, “I know all you assholes are old, but y’all ‘cannot’ have known each other ‘that’ long.”
This comment was a result of one of our comments about how we’d been hearing the same s**t for 20 years and the only that had changed was the briefer, and the horse was still dead…
So we started tracking back… seven of us have known each other an AVERAGE of 22 years… The ‘new’ kid, only 11 years, myself and one other guy 40 years this month…
Damn… We’re old…
But after we’d figured that out, she just looked at us in amazement…
Well, that and the fact that one of the guys said his job lately was killing the good idea fairy…
He’d basically been designated as the go-to guy for new ‘innovative’ things… Except all the ‘new’ things were stuff that had been tried before (and didn’t work)… Including one where the kid came in with the next sliced bread idea, and he said he literally pulled a 14 year old document of the bottom drawer of his desk, handed to the kid and watched his face crumble when he realized it was ‘exactly’ what he was proposing… 🙂
But the funniest thing was a fly on the wall moment (actually two)…
I’m standing out on my hotel balcony early in the am Wednesday, and I’m looking at the parking lot next door. It being Kalifornia, there were 20 compact parking spaces, about 6 ‘regular’ parking spaces, and FOUR oversized spaces. I see a Prius come in, and pull into one of the oversized spaces, closely followed by an F-250 crew cab who parks in another oversized space. The driver of the truck says something to the woman about proper parking space, she yells she’ll park any damn place she wants to since she’s the first one there, and it’s closer to the building, yada, yada…
Wednesday afternoon, I look at the parking lot, and there are at least five big pickups in the parking lot, and four or five SUVs, some of which are shoehorned into compact parking spaces.
Thursday morning, I get up and go out on the balcony, look over and all the big trucks are there at 0600, and have taken ALL the big spaces, and all but one of the ‘regular’ spaces are also full of SUVs. I see the Prius pull in and stop short… And she drives around the parking lot about three times, and finally pulls into TWO of the compact spaces and goes stomping into the office building…
Would have loved to be a birdie on the wall for ‘that’ little set to… LOL
We weren’t treated that well, which is why we try our damnest to let those serving today how much we appreciate their service…
As JP said, it was, to us, both a duty and an honor…
Nuff said…
Bring a Kleenex…
For all those who didn’t make it back… Aviators or not…
Sadly Colonel Bud Day passed away in July of last year. A fitting tribute is HERE.
h/t JP