Plugged Back In

After five years of resistance I'm back on Face Palm.  I blogged about the evils of Face Palm when I deleted my original account, you can read about that here.  I still agree with everything I wrote in that essay, but becoming a business owner has necessitated the removal of some idealism.  I got tired of losing business on Thumbtack because I couldn't respond quickly unless I was home with access to our laptop.  Often times people will select the first professional that contacts them (I know, I've been that professional several times).  We were also commonly receiving texts that said "no content," and I got tired of explaining to potential clients that I had an alleged dumb phone and all I got was "no content" rather than a text they had spent their time typing.  Several times they were long texts and I suspect that was the reason my alleged dumb phone couldn't handle it.  Still we fought on with our obsolete ways. 

Finally Wendy was off shooting a wedding and the phone went missing.  We decided we'd better just accept the fact that we needed smart phones, and so off to Sprint Wendy went to progress us into the 21st century.  I didn't go, but apparently the entire staff circled around my alleged dumb phone and made noises of amazement while they took turns passing around the alleged dumb phone marvel (it even had a touch screen, but we had fixed the phones so that they would not connect to the internet...it was a rumor touch from 2010).  They gave us two iphone 6's to replace our obsolescence.  The next day my laptop bit the bullet for the final time.  My laptop was a Toshiba Satellite that I bought in 2007.  I had the hard drive replaced and had to bring it in to the computer geek many times to have it fixed.  However, seeing as how an iphone is a computer, I found that by simply ordering a blue tooth keyboard for the iphone, along with an iphone stand, I could side step even needing a laptop.

Still, I resisted Face Palm.  I tried running my business Face Palm page, Ancient Earth Landscaping , using my wife's FB account on my phone, but that resulted in me posting to her page.  We couldn't figure out how I could run my page using her account on my phone, and it was just adding frustration to her life attempting to figure it out.  I thought about it and realized that I really had no leg to stand on where opposition to FB was concerned.  I had plugged back in, and that was necessitated by my need to run a business FB account.  You can't have just a business account.  All my opposition was doing was making my wife's life more complicated.  It was rapidly shaping up to my return to FB, and so here I am, completely plugged back in. 

I enjoy being able to listen to Spotify with blue tooth headphones anywhere I go.  The CD player in my truck stopped working years ago, so up till now I've been at the mercy of the radio.  I haven't listened to the radio in my truck since I got my iphone.  I have a camera, a video recorder, a calendar, a virtual jukebox, and the apps keep piling up (so far it's Thumbtack, Spotify, Weather, Blogger, Wikipedia, youtube, FB, and yes even Angry Birds).  It's great except for when I imagine myself holding that damn "phone" staring into the virtual world that I've detested for so long.  My world is the green world of plants and soil, not the virtual world of Face Palm and Instagram, except for the fact that these virtual places are part of my world now.  I'm embracing this inherent hypocrisy.  What am I to do other than accept it?

What is a reason to resist any longer?  The world went and got virtual, at least where people are concerned.  Now Wendy and I can lay in bed and be blissfully alone together in the evening (we have a healthy love life, but you know what I mean).  As far as privacy is concerned, what of it?  I'm amazed at how frazzled so many facepalmer's seem to be about the privacy issue with Face Palm.  What privacy?  Maybe some of my readers haven't heard about a federal agency called the "National Security Agency," or NSA, and the city they have in the desert that is five times the size of Washington DC dedicated to the surveillance of every communication of all stripes in the good ole Fascist States of America.  Every phone call, text, Face Palm message, email, and squeaky fart you let out is recorded and pigeon holed into your communication record at the NSA.  You can read about this fact here.  Here is a quick excerpt from the linked article:

 Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

 So, if you are upset about privacy on Face Palm than you obviously have not been paying attention.  Of course there is the Patriot Act to consider.  If you don't know, that's the legislation that was enacted day's after 9/11 that makes it legal for our government to make you disappear and tell nobody about it.  You'll never be seen or heard from again and this is all legal.  They just have to suspect that you are a terrorist and away you disappear.  So if you don't want to have your privacy trampled on than you should no longer communicate with any kind of device.  Don't talk on a land line, don't use a cell phone, and don't use the internet under any capacity because even your google searches are being recorded by the NSA.  This brings me to the final issue I'll be tackling in this essay...that's right, gun control (and now for my promised trick where I make some Face Palm friends disappear).

In my opinion "gun control" is where you slow your breathing, keep both eyes open as you look through your iron sites (or scope), calm your nerves, and finally slowly exhale as you gently pull back on the trigger knowing that your aim is true.  I am not a violent person.  In fact, I don't believe in violence.  When I was training in Nihon Ghoshin Aikido my Sensei first taught me how to not fight.  He taught me how to use my words to diffuse any aggression and how to not get cornered and assure an escape route if at all possible.  Then he taught me how to use the energy of my attacker against him to cause controlled pain via joint locks and pressure points to further convince him that violence was not the answer.  Then he taught me how to kill with extreme prejudice and efficiency using my attackers weapon.  That's when I stopped training having achieved Ni Kyu or student instructor with all 50 techniques in the art and joined the Navy.

Firstly I'm not going to surrender my guns because I like them.  Occasionally I put venison on the table for my family to eat by hunting with my riffle.  This is 100% organic meat, and it's as organic as meat gets being that the animal has eaten from the wilderness it's entire life.  I could do this with a bow and arrow, but I don't have a bow and arrow right now.  I have guns.  Secondly all disarming the populace would do is to ensure that only our tyrannical government and criminals would have guns.  Law abiding citizens would be the only people without guns.  The hunting industry in the U.S. is a billion dollar industry and so removing guns would remove a lot of jobs from our atrophying economy.  If citizens don't need guns than why do police need guns?  Why does the military need guns?  Would the proponents of "gun control" agree that the military and police should surrender their guns?  I think not.  The fact of the matter is that guns exist, and so bad people have guns, and therefore I need guns.  If I could hockity pockety wokity whack every gun off of the planet I would do so, and I would happily hunt for my venison with bow and arrow, but I, nor anybody else on this side of mortal, have that ability.

Now for the school shootings, isn't this a bit like the terrorist bogey man?  You can't fight terrorism because terrorism resides in the black heart of the terrorist.  At any moment anybody can decide to be a terrorist, just as any kid can decide to go to school and start killing.  Let us imagine for a moment that all guns are completely eradicated from the Earth, even the world's military's don't have guns any longer.  Now some high schooler that's all bent out of shape because daddy left years ago and mommy has taken to prostitution to put food on the table and pay bills.  She's an alcoholic and on cussitol to cope leaving her virtually paralyzed to care for our bent high schooler.  On top of all of this he can't get a girlfriend to save his life, and nobody wants to be friends with him because he has bad hygiene and his breath constantly stinks.  He's also socially awkward.  Well he's had enough of this shit and decides he wants to die, but before he goes he wants to release his rage on the peers that have caused him so much pain.  He acquires a Samurai sword and spends weeks getting it as sharp as possible.  He goes to school one day and just as he enters the main hall minutes before the bell rings, he pulls out the sword and starts decapitating heads.  How many heads do you think he could decapitate before being stopped by the police?  Remember, there are no longer any guns, so I guess the local law enforcement would have to taser him?

Now, before you delete me from your Face Palm friend list, let me apologize for being so crass and brazen with making my point.  I am an Aspie after all, and I can relate to the feelings of the imagined high schooler I just created.  My father left when I was four and I have always been slightly awkward socially.  I was lucky enough to have the unconditional love of a beautiful mother (and I still do), and I was also able to find romantic love as a teenager, and I had a few friends to boot.  I'm not trying to make lite of the recent school shootings, or any school shooting for that matter.  I feel for all of the people caught up in these tragedies, but I also know that our government regularly kills innocent civilians with drones and that they drop bombs on hospitals, mosques, and red cross centers (I was on the USS Carl Vinson during Operation Enduring Freedom and I know this first hand).  There is no shortage of tragedies in our imperfect world.  Removing guns will accomplish nothing except making it easier for criminals to commit crime.  Guns or no, it's not guns that kill it's people.  Now go ahead and hit delete.  Your delusions will not stop me from telling the truth.

 

FTN

I've told this story too many times. To myself, to patrons of the bars I've worked at, to associates, to acquaintances, to friends, and I've written it in many different ways as well. It's true, and not really that interesting, but it had a large impact on who I am now. I never wanted to be a nuclear engineer, not even while I was one. That title "nuclear engineer" is really a misnomer because what I actually was was a steam plant mechanic; it just so happens that I was standing about fifteen feet from a nuclear reactor while I was mechanicing. What makes my story a bit more interesting is not that I was standing watch in the nuclear bowels of an air craft carrier just outside of the straits of Hormuz when 911 happened, but that I did not want to be there. I don't think anybody really wanted to be there, but I went to great measures to no longer be there.

On September 11 2001 the U.S.S. Carl Vinson was prepared to pass through the straits of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. The skin of the ship was secure and nobody was allowed outside due to the potential small arms fire. When a carrier passes through the straits, the indigenous population has a habit of popping off rounds, which can actually hit the ship. I was in my rack sleeping, and I was woken by a shipmate of mine "McCarty, McCarty...wake up man, we're at war."

"War!!! What the fuck are you talking about?" I got up and went into the berthing lounge, where there was a television mounted in the corner that the Captain would occasionally connect to CNN via satellite link for important news. Just as I was wiping the sleep out of my eyes, I looked up in time to see the second plane crash into the building. We could feel the ship listing as it turned around to head back out into the Arabian Sea to begin "Operation Enduring freedom." The fact that we were launching jets off of the flight deck around the clock really didn't change my life much. Either way my job was the same; make sure the nuclear power plant was working just fine for all of the steam that we needed to keep the war machine functioning. I had a small part to play in that, and that mainly consisted of standing watch at the main feed pumps (MFP). These pumps pumped water into the steam generator which cooled the reactor water and produced steam to power everything on the ship. There were many other watch stations for me to stand around at, but like everything else in the nuclear navy I had to first "qualify" to stand them. The MFP station just happened to be the first one I qualified for while we were at sea.

Life at sea sucked with more power than a black hole, and in fact THE bull shit black hole that services the United States was located in that power plant. It required constant heapings of bull shit to remain satiated. It's favorite type of bull shit was bureaucratically generated. Every day at sea was a work day, except for Sundays, but even then we had to stand five hour watches. I could go on and on about why being at sea sucked so bad, and I have for a 100 or so pages in a book titled "Surrender" that I have never finished writing, so I won't be doing that here. Suffice it to say that we ate food that had "not fit for human consumption, military and prisoner use only" stamped on the side of the boxes, we breathed what we called "boat funk" which was a mix of recycled engine room oil, nut sack jam, and farts, and you did this on an average of five hours of sleep a day (except for the boat funk part...that was 24/7)...all while being surrounded by nothing but navy fucks. It sucked.

My problem was not so much how bad it sucked (although I had a bit of a problem with that part as well), but with the fact that we were dropping bombs and firing missiles day and night at a nomadic peoples who had no idea what the fuck was going on. After 115 days at sea (which is how long I went without seeing land), we were informed by some douche bag admiral that had flown onto the boat, that between the Vinson and the Kitty Hawk we had dropped 3 million tons of ordinance. I believe it. They stored the munitions in huge storage rooms just beneath the aft galley. I would routinely be eating my not fit for human consumption non-food while the gunnies busied themselves carting bombs past me to the hanger bay. They had fun writing racial slurs on the sides of the bombs as a personal touch for the innocent people they were to destroy. Did I mention that I became a Buddhist while I was in the navy?  It's safe to state that I was a bit conflicted by my station in life.

So, one day, having had enough of this naval nonsense, a friend and I decided that we would do something about it. There are all manner of tactics that can be employed to get your ass out of the navy while at sea. Indeed, they were employed often. We heard about them through the grape vine; pissing yourself in your rack every night while refusing to bath, lodging yourself in a bilge while refusing to eat, attempting suicide by all manner imaginable, one guy even jumped off of the flight deck into the dark Arabian sea in the middle of the night (luckily for him one of the boatswain mates who's job it was to look out into the dark sea for people such as he, spotted him before he became shark bait), but we didn't want to harm or kill ourselves. We elected to employ what was colloquially known as a "rainbow chit." My buddy and I wrote little notes that said "I, insert name, social, rate and rank, willingly admit to being a homosexual and because of that would like to be separated from the navy." We turned them into ships admin and waited.

They say that one enlisted nuke costs the navy in the neighborhood of 250,000 dollars to get through the "nuclear pipeline." It takes two years from boot camp to the fleet to create a nuke. Once on the ship it's another couple of months before a nuke is no longer a "nub" (none useful body) and can actually contribute by standing watch and performing maintenance. The navy has a hard time filling all of their nuclear positions.  Most people who are intelligent enough to become a nuke don't, they go to college, or choose other more fulfilling career paths like panhandling or suckin' strange wieners for smack. The point is that once you are in the nuclear program (more so once you complete it) you are not getting out of it. 

 So my buddy and I ended up at the Captain's at sea cabin one night. The at sea cabin is located on level ten. Level 10 is located in the tower which is the highest structure on the flight deck. This is the Captains own personal chill pad. At any rate, me, my buddy, the Master Chief in charge of reactor department, and the Captain are all standing there in his at sea cabin staring at one another. The Captain (whom I had never seen in person in the five or so months I'd been on the carrier) looks at me and says "I've read your letter, and I'm here to tell you to go back to work." So much for the "don't ask don't tell policy." At that moment I looked at my buddy, and he looked at me, and we both contemplated making out with each other in front of both of them. I almost leaned in to go gay for a minute, but at the last minute decided that as much as I liked my buddy, I wasn't going to make out with him. I wanted to say to the captain "so you mean we can continue pushin' each other's shit in while in the showers and you don't care?" But I didn't, I just hung my head and prayed to whatever would listen that nobody on the ship would find out that I was "homosexual." People got their asses beat for those sort of proclivities.

I was pissed off at the fact that we had to follow the rules and they didn't. "Don't ask don't tell" applied to the entire navy, so long as it wasn't the nuclear one. That's why the Captain did what he did. He was just calling our bluff. I guess he figured if we were telling the truth somebody would eventually catch us blowin' one another and he'd kick us out then. So it was back to the engine room for my sorry ass. I had another trick up my sleeve, and as soon as we pulled into San Diego to drop off the air wing I pulled it out. We got four hours of liberty while in port, and I took advantage of my "liberty." I grabbed a few of the civilian things that I had and fuckin' left. The same buddy that I had turned my rainbow chit in with had actually scheduled to go on leave for two weeks while we were in San Diego. I had him pick me up, and I was enroute to his house while the boat was leaving without me to return to Bremerton Washington.

We got an ounce of herb and smoked it all. 28 days latter I walked my ass back onto the boat and turned myself in. Due to the fact that we were "at war," at 30 days I became a deserter and could technically be put to death for my desertion. I didn't want to test out that theory. After being gone for 28 days, the Master Chief gave me my military I.D. back and said he'd see me in two weeks. I was confused, but I didn't argue. I walked back off of the boat and drove back to California to enjoy another two weeks off of the boat. My family was devastated. Nobody understood why I had done what I had done. While I was UA (the navy's version of AWOL...Unauthorized Absence) the navy sent all manner of threatening letters to my family, as well as called repeatedly trying to ascertain my whereabouts. I didn't care about the consequences. What I cared about was no longer participating in "Operation Enduring Freedom."

To my mind, it was just senseless violence, and I didn't understand it. I had no idea why 911 had happened, and I didn't know who Osama Bin Laden was, or that the whole thing was really about oil. I had never heard of Peak Oil at the time, and I had no idea about fiat currency or infinite growth on a finite planet. I was 21 years old. All I wanted was to get stoned on the beach, fall in love with a woman, make love, read, write, create art and music, and maybe eventually check into a Buddhist monastery to meditate my way to Nirvana (if the whole making love thing didn't work out). What I knew with certainty was that I was not going to participate in the madness of war any longer. I've heard the argument "well you willingly signed up to join the military...what did you think the military was about," and? Yeah, I was 19 when I signed up for the military. I had been indoctrinated by my society to believe in patriotism and the flag. I was in JROTC for four years. To the people who say to me that what I did was wrong, I say too bad for you. I raised my level of consciousness to worldcentric and could no longer abide senseless killing. I did what I had to do to not abide it. The navy wasn't done with me yet...I had a pointless and torturous crucible to go through to reach separation and receive my "other than honorable discharge."