Why Freedom of Expression Is Important

[Naga_Fireball]

Hi friends, and tolerant individuals, lol.

I thought I'd share a story from my Air Force days. This story goes a lot of directions, but hopefully one of the points it drives home is the importance to healthy Americans of freedom of expression, ie your first amendment right to peacefully assemble.

When John Kerry was running for president, I had been in the West Virginia ANG for a few years, if memory serves. He came to a rally, maybe in Charleston -- I don't recall.

As many of you know, in our country, members of the military apparently cannot attend political rallies in uniform; ie they can't endorse a candidate while representing the armed forces.

Unfortunately for her career, one of my unit's high ranking NCOs decided to attend this John Kerry rally in uniform and damn the consequences. It just so happens she was the NCO in charge of "phase" inspections on our aircraft, which is an invasive process done in a separate hangar from typical aircraft maintenance. It has to be done on a precise schedule, and drawing it out delays the aircraft's mission capability, of course.

This lady ended up being fired from her full time position as supervisor of this dock. A guy named Ed Carson was hired on to replace her. The first thing Ed did was piss off every shop in the unit that had to deal directly with the tasks involved in these "phase" inspections, by changing the reporting process and adding to it.

Ed figured that if he posted a giant bulletin board in the hangar with each task typed on a line and a space for the technician to check off and initial each tiny box, that he would somehow be improving the process of an invasive inspection. Not only did he make this a mandatory practice in that workspace, he initiated a tradition of calling each shop chief first thing in the morning to harass him or her with the details on the "work board" not yet initialed and checked. Ed became PITA #1 in aircraft maintenance in other words.

Well, it just so happens that when we started going through this painful transition, I was busy trying to qualify for my "5 level" certification, which increases a technician's level of accountability in terms of working and closing out work orders safely. If I am not mistaken, a 5-level or higher must be present on site to supervise any tests of mounted aircraft equipment with electrical or hydraulic power engaged.

I was a 3-level, barely past entry level. Ed calls the shop one morning to demand an accounting from my boss regarding a hydraulic pressure indicator test. The boss delegated this task to a fellow tech sergeant who was a 7-level, who responded inappropriately to the order by directing me and another 3-level to go and do it.

We were cowed and went to comply. The hangar was overfull of technicians, to the point where it was overstimulating. Crew chiefs were gutting the inner workings of the entire tail end. Before Ed Carson, technicians never ever overcrowded each other during phase. Partly due to this and to the shock of having no supervisor on site, the accompanying technician and I accidentally omitted the most crucial step of a successful and safe power on check, which on a C-130H is the hydraulic tie handle near the rear crew door.

We got thumbs up from the crew chiefs to do the check. No one remembered the hydraulic tie handle.

We got electrical power on and did the cockpit checklist for hydraulic power. There were no lock outs and tag outs. I flipped the switch for hydraulic power to be engaged and the crew chiefs all started screaming "Turn it off! ! Turn it OFF!!" At the same time, the control columns rocketed forward unexpectedly.

I flipped the switch back to resting position and turned off aircraft power. We both rushed down the stairs and around the wing to see what had happened.

Two crew chiefs assigned to the dock had narrowly avoided serious injury. One pulled his fingers loose from the gear assembly associated with the elevator surfaces on the empennage just in time. The other had yanked his elbow away from the falling elevator before it sheared the limb off of his body.

We were all profoundly shaken by this event. It was so severe that in fact I believe it was covered up. One of those two crew chiefs ended up losing his job later; they were all coming off of Mefloquine after a deployment and it was the worst timing possible for an incident.

This close call to what could have been a horrendous industrial accident accounts for much of my PTSD.

I'm glad no one died.

All because wearing a uniform to a rally is somehow wrong. .. and they hired an asshole to replace a very competent supervisor

Hugs to the other veterans out there, especially the ones who aren't perfect. Lol

[neonblue]

WOW Naga! What a nightmare experience and well told… you brought the message home indelibly.

[neonblue]

What a poignant symbolic image - so beautifully succinct!

[Naga_Fireball]

Thank you Neonblue and Anders!
Unfortunately yes, at the time it was terrible. Also never getting in official trouble felt awful, like we were getting away with murder, except it was an accident.

One downside of taking a maintenance job, particularly as enlisted Air Force, is the fact most people in that position will never see the enemy with their own eyes.

Unfortunately in the Air Force, unless you are lucky enough to be pilot or flight crew, the worst enemy you will ever meet is yourself. Driven low by the senseless paranoia of one's superiors amd mired heavily in self doubt, it is easy to see why many air force troops experience inordinate illness and depression.

It's probably a great place for psychic people to get sick. You're always surrounded by this cloud of fear and negativity, except on good days, in some units. But you rarely if ever get to see the upside of despair and terror, which is the excitement our pilots and soldiers and soecial forces and flight crews experience.

There is something healing about passing through the unknown full of danger and coming home whole. The Air Force doesn't really get to be so detached and mission oriented. It might sound prestigious but we are definitely a few layers below the other chickens being fed.

My coworkers, many of them, seemed politically and individually helpless. In terms of job and communication, I stood out as being helpless too. I didn't keep up with the exercise and was not excited about promotions.

Because even though we were buried by the fear and dread of never ending war, we never got to see it, never faced those fears in real life, and internalized them. Some were better at dealing with it than others, but those people were busy fighting political battles so they could move up into management.

There were very few truly heroic examples. The president would land at our base occasionally but most of us didn't get to or want to see that either.


Fundamentally I'm a stress junkie by nurture who hates working with emotional incompents who are technically adequate. I would have done better on a strike team or medicine, flight crew etc something exciting.

Unfortunately the only impressive jobs open at the time of my enlistment were Intelligence, Guidance and Control, flight crew ; (. And i didn't pick flight crew that had the SERE training and all that cool shit.

And ultimately in maintenance we are thr enemies of each other, because it doesn't matter who made the mistake if we all get injured or punished, it's sort of hard to feel any brotherhood in the air force

Because "we're not trained for it" lol.

In basic training unfortunately my wingman dropped out, I was alone for 6 weeks, the only person in basic without a partner that I've ever heard of.

Now that I'm separated from the service, I feel so guilty and sad about all of this stuff, that I don't even go to VFW or any of the other gathering places. My base sucked badly enough that I don't want to poison the other veterans with my depression regarding it or be reminded of it.

I kind of wish it had never happened or that I'd never gotten out, but then all that work for Alex Jones, the lady from CNN who asked about mefloquine and did the FOIAs, my blog, PA, etc would never have happened.

It's probably better than being an IED victim from the Army wheeling around wondering Why Me. But aside from a few surface issues, being out of shape, and being sort of crazy, there's not that much wrong with me and I kind of wish I could try a job better suited to my physical ability and not some fucking unreachable psychological goal of perfect compliance.

[Naga_Fireball]

P.s. one final note and moral of the story,
Because no one in the high ranks would stand up to Ed's pressuring, and tell him to wait, there was an accident in the workplace.

Before that, because they opted to fire the previous supervising NCO, the base leadership created the conditions of chaos that lead to an accident. Military cannot survive without order.

Now, the middleman in our shop, the guy who delegated the task to me, felt he had too much of the paperwork and was being treated like a secretary. For that reason, along with dislike of Ed, he failed to do as told and accompany the 3levels.

At this point it does become my own fault. My gut feeling was to disobey and delay the job until an appropriately qualified technician was free. Unfortunately the crew chiefs probably did not need the hydraulic pressure gauge to function in order to work on the system. Really it is important mostly in the air, where loss of pressure csn happen when the aircraft sustains damage to the lines.

And of course lastly, me physically going out with this nerd from the Netherlands to attempt the job and us both missing the hydraulic tie handle. I failed my duty hard. But truthfully duty had been failed at the point where our base fired a person with a good safety record over a political error.

It's a sad deal, a very tall shit sandwich. Even though he didn't get cut physically to ribbons, the guy who had his arm up in the tail never got over that day. It contributed heavily to his habits of drinking and work avoidance.

Pretty much I got a guy fired because I failed to stand up to the retards running my shop and the Sparkle Barbie (Ed Carson ) who felt the need to gut our reporting system.


See, each Phase or ISO is logged and generated in readable format by the program G081. G081 was a software program we used to log maintenance changes. It was slow at times but accessible anywhere in the squadron with a computer terminal.

Then of course we had the Book, each plane had its own maintenance logbook that was the original blueprint for the information in G081.

So we didnt really need the big noisy bulletin board!!



It's crazy isn't it.

@@

[Naga_Fireball]

Update from cnn, please pray for the troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. A guy allegedly set off an explosive vest near people getting ready to jog.

"The question now is, how did someone get inside?" she said. "There's very strict security at these bases. ... If you come in a vehicle, you are stopped well before the outside gate. Vehicles are searched, people are searched, people must have ID -- so it's very difficult to understand right now how this happened."

Reeks of inside job. Wow such bad timing.

P.s. update

(CNN)A suicide bomb attack killed at least 52 people and injured more than 100 others during a religious ceremony in the remote mountains of Pakistan Saturday evening, according to local law enforcement.

Through its media wing Amaq, ISIS claimed responsibility for the blast on a Sufi shrine in the Lasbela district of Balochistan, 120 miles from Karachi.

Even sadder!!!!!

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/11/12 ... -line.html

...

He is 27 year old Bordentown, New Jersey native and volunteer combat medic Pete Reed. He was a ski instructor, served in the Marines, and learned medical skills. Now he and others are saving Iraqi soldier and civilian lives on the ISIS front line.

“At the end of the day they’re just people and they’re in the middle of a meat grinder,” he told us.

[Naga_Fireball]

One of the reasons this Mefloquine thing has to be exposed:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/wo ... abuse.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo
Secrecy, mistrust and the shadow of interrogation at the American prison limited doctors’ ability to treat mental illness among detainees.

By SHERI FINK
NOVEMBER 12, 2016


....
Every day when Lt. Cmdr. Shay Rosecrans crossed into the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, she tucked her medical school class ring into her bra, covered the name on her uniform with tape and hid her necklace under her T-shirt, especially if she was wearing a cross.

She tried to block out thoughts of her 4-year-old daughter. Dr. Rosecrans, a Navy psychiatrist, had been warned not to speak about her family or display anything personal, clues that might allow a terrorism suspect to identify her.

Patients called her “torture bitch,” spat at her co-workers and shouted death threats, she said. One hurled a cup of urine, feces and other fluids at a psychologist working with her. Even interviewing prisoners to assess their mental health set off recriminations and claims that she was torturing them. “What would your Jesus think?” they demanded.

Dr. Rosecrans, now retired from the Navy, led one of the mental health teams assigned to care for detainees at the island prison over the past 15 years. Some prisoners had arrived disturbed — traumatized adolescents hauled in from the battlefield, unstable adults who disrupted the cellblocks. Others, facing indefinite confinement, struggled with despair.

Then there were prisoners who had developed symptoms including hallucinations, nightmares, anxiety or depression after undergoing brutal interrogations at the hands of Americans who were advised by other health personnel.

[ N.F. says Red Flag: Mefloquine ]

At Guantánamo, a willful blindness to the consequences emerged. Those equipped to diagnose, document and treat the effects — psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health teams — were often unaware of what had happened.

Sometimes by instruction and sometimes by choice, they typically did not ask what the prisoners had experienced in interrogations, current and former military doctors said. That compromised care, according to outside physicians working with legal defense teams, previously undisclosed medical records and court filings.

Dozens of men who underwent agonizing treatment in secret C.I.A. prisons or at Guantánamo were left with psychological problems that persisted for years, despite government lawyers’ assurances that the practices did not constitute torture and would cause no lasting harm, The New York Times has reported. Some men should never have been held, government investigators concluded. President-elect Donald J. Trump declared during his campaign that he would bring back banned interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, and authorize others that were “much worse.”

Nyt.com:

How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds

After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’

Where Even Nightmares Are Classified: Psychiatric Care at Guantánamo

Secret Documents Show a Tortured Prisoner's Descent

Memories of a Secret C.I.A. Prison

More infowarriors taking on the mefloquine issue:

beebs Avatar beebs
Star Member
*****
Jun 17, 2012 at 4:30am
Quote


Lariam should be withdrawn from the market. Most common strains of
Plasmodium falciparum are resistant to treatmen. I haven't checked
geographical areas and various strains recently, but if this was the case btween 2002-2004 .. Observation is that the local population in mosquitoes infested area take precautions, such as chewing various leaves; they do not suffer as high infections portrayed in the press. Furthermore, those parasites are not unique in central nervous system/cerebral infection, it applies to most infectious pathogens. The propaganda to justify usage of Lariam/Mefloquine & other prophylaxis is profit driven...

Excerpts of an "Open Letter addressed to General Tacket"

“This further investigation may throw light upon the Guantanamo SOP wherein all detainees were subjected to a never-before-attempted use of mass administration of treatment doses of the controversial anti-malaria drug mefloquine (Lariam), as also reported in a special investigation by Jason Leopold and myself last December. The scandal was also the subject of an independent investigatory report published at the same time by Seton Hall University Law School’s Center for Policy and Research.

In a 2002 report on mefloquine adverse events, “Unexpected frequency, duration and spectrum of adverse events after therapeutic dose of mefloquine in healthy adults,” published in top medical journal Acta Tropica, it was noted that 73% of the participants suffered “severe (grade 3) vertigo …” which “required bed rest and specific medication for 1 to 4 days.”

Nevertheless, DoD maintains that the use of mefloquine was for public health purposes, to prevent malaria from spreading in Cuba. But as our investigation showed, talking with military medical experts, and examining other military responses to malaria threat, including in Cuba, no such use of such mass treatment doses, with its attendant dangers, was ever used or even proposed. Nor did DoD medical officers at Guantanamo demand the same protocols be used on foreign workers from malarial areas brought into the camp at this same time to work on building Camp Delta and other facilities at the naval base. The workers were employed by Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.” Cont/.... nuclearnuttery.com/2011/05/01/the-mefloquine-letter-open-letter-to-general-tackett-one-missing-link-between-gitmo-ptsd-sufferers-and-returning-us-vets-with-ptsd-shocking/


Read more: http://health-quest.proboards.com/threa ... z4Pq6HFPQG" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Naga_Fireball]

Regarding the lady who was fired in my first post.

Wikipedia :

Promotion to senior master sergeant is the most difficult enlisted promotion to attain in the Air Force. It is the first enlisted grade to which results of a central promotion board are the primary factor in selection for promotion.

And

SMSgts are key, experienced, operational leaders, skilled at merging their personnel's talents, skills, and resources with other teams' functions to most effectively accomplish the mission. SMSgts continue to develop their leadership and management skills in preparation for expanded responsibilities and higher leadership positions. SMSgts normally operate at the operational level of leadership.

[Naga_Fireball]

Oh dear.

POLICE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT
Michigan cop suspended for driving with Confederate flag at anti-Trump protest
Published November 14, 2016
FoxNews.com

A Michigan police officer was suspended Sunday with pay after he was seen off-duty driving a pickup truck bearing a Confederate flag around a group protesting Donald Trump’s election as president.

This is why cars and trucks should be considered tools not toys. It's hard to assault someone with a toy but this cop in Michigan was menacing the protestors.


It's funny because i thought Michigan police had bigger brains but apparently there's just more to fuck up.

; ( lol

But see how the cop gets Suspended and maintenance lady gets fired? She wasn't menacing anyone at the Kerry rally, she was just standing there enjoying American freedom, whereas this cheese head donut dunker was overtly provoking a response by harassing members of a different idealogical identity. ...


The nuances of American patriotism lol