Posts Tagged ‘NG36B’

More disincentives for veterans to report mental health problems

Posted: September 9, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Afghanistan war
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As a military member, reporting mental health problems is a Catch-22. On one hand, everyone is encouraging you to speak up when you need help, but then you tend to get punished when you do.

For example, it used to be if you claimed any sort of mental health problem, from depression and anxiety to even trauma due to a sexual assault, it would cause your clearance to be suspended. Thankfully, that isn’t true anymore, and on my last security clearance questions, I noticed that the interviewer only asked if I had schizophrenia or other delusional-type illnesses.

The stigma is still very real, and most vets won’t seek treatment because they think something bad will happen to them. And for those that are pilots, another shoe dropped. From the Washington Post:

Federal authorities have been investigating nearly5,000 pilots suspected of falsifying their medical records to conceal that they were receiving benefits for mental health disorders and other serious conditions that could make them unfit to fly, documents and interviews show.

The pilots under scrutiny are military veterans who told the Federal Aviation Administration that they are healthy enough to fly, yet failed to report — as required by law — that they were also collecting veterans benefits for disabilities that could bar them from the cockpit.

Sounds bad right? So what sorts of disabilities did they find pilots not reporting?

“If they’re going to shine a light on veterans, they need to shine a light everywhere,” said Rick Mangini, 52, a former Army pilot who has been grounded from his job flying for a cargo company since his medical certificate was not renewed last month. The FAA notified him in May that he was under review for failing to disclose sleep apnea, for which he receives VA disability benefits, Mangini said. Although he checked the box on his application that asked if he receives any government disability benefits, Mangini, who lives in Killeen, Tex., said he was not aware he had to provide specifics.

Sleep apnea. Yup. They also look for depression and anxiety, but its not an automatic grounding if you have those:

Pilots who have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions are not automatically prohibited from flying. But the FAA requires them to be closely monitored because their conditions and medications can affect their ability to safely handle an aircraft.

Now, you would think given the size of the investigation that we have lots of suicidal pilots out there, but according to the article, we haven’t lost a passenger plane since 2009, and while the article indicated there is suspicion that some pilots may have deliberately crashed in other countries, its not 100% confirmed.

So what’s going to happen? Well:

  1. Military pilots will stop reporting mental health problems, and will not get the help they need.
  2. These guys and gals will pay a lot of money to people that specialize in VA claims that will get them benefits without having to be reported.
  3. At some point, a veteran pilot is going to commit suicide and leave a note that says he was afraid of getting help because he wouldn’t be employable anymore.

There is already a stigma that being in the military causes mental health problems, and this is going to further push people away from joining.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Lying about reproductive health

Posted: September 2, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in catholic
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As a man, my doctor never talks to me about women’s health. Maybe that’s because my doctors don’t ask me my preferred pronouns, maybe it’s because I just don’t bring it up, or maybe because we just don’t talk with married men about sex…who knows? I sure don’t.

Recently this changed a bit, because my wife asked me to accompany her on one of her doctor visits. Easy enough, I sat and mostly just listened. But while we were waiting, I noticed an interesting poster on the back of the patient room’s door.

Well, isn’t that interesting, I thought. Because my wife and I use the Marquette Method of Natural Family Planning, I already knew that the “Fertility Awareness” stats were bogus. A quick DuckDuckGo search will show the following:

So how do they get 88% effectiveness? Well, if you roll in a bunch of not-as-effective methods, such as temperature and calendar methods, it brings the numbers down. I confirmed this at Planned Parenthood’s website and at ContraceptionChoices.org. Interestingly, none of them referenced Creighton or Marquette. Why would that be? Wouldn’t you want to “Follow the science” and give women choices that don’t involve chemicals?

When you view the medical establishment as a bureaucracy interested in making money, this becomes a much more interesting chart. Everything in the “Works Best” and “Works Pretty Well” category requires a doctor and is covered by insurance. Why would a doctor want to prescribe the Creighton or Marquette methods when they won’t get any money or kick-back for doing so?

Conservative men, especially lawmakers, have dropped the ball here. We’ve created a medical system that promotes pumping women full of hormones and chemicals to stop pregnancy, then promotes the same system to pump them full of hormones and chemicals when they want to get pregnant, and we make insurance companies pay for it. We then have a just-as-effective option that doesn’t involve chemicals, and we allow the medical establishment that has zero interest in promoting it to demonize and dismiss NFP as something those crazy conservative kids do that doesn’t really work all that well.

For all the men reading this, your wife and daughters are reading that poster every time they go to the doctor. They are being manipulated on every visit to the doctor. I’m guessing you don’t talk to them about it because, well, you’re a guy and we’ve allowed society to say you don’t have a voice in this discussion, and that only a doctor with a self-interest in prescribing medication can talk to your daughter about this topic.

Thinking about it, maybe that’s why my doctor never talks to me about women’s health….

Sun Tzu talked about winning without fighting, and it looks like the medical establishment is doing just that. The poster says “Your body, your choice,” but all the “good” choices push money into the system, so do you really have choices?

Conservatives need to push for laws that require insurance companies to cover natural family planning costs, such as a fertility monitor and the cost of visits to an NFP practitioner. Sure, plenty of families can afford these costs, but not everyone can, and more importantly, it puts money into a far better solution. Planned Parenthood can muster a ton of money when doctors and your insurance company are feeding them insurance dollars, so imagine a world where NFP gets similar treatment. I like that world a lot more than our current world.

On top of that, every Catholic Church should have a rolodex of NFP practitioners. Priests should be taught about the different NFP methods and should refer their parishioners to them. They should have the occasional sermon on NFP, and it should be a topic in pre-marital counseling. You know how many priests I’ve heard talk intelligently about NFP?

Zero

…and that’s a problem. We need to stop being squeamish about this because when we don’t talk about it, someone else fills the void.

Stop pretending men don’t have a role in reproductive health, and stop letting the establishment lie to your face about NFP.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. BTW, Tricare covers everything but NFP as well, how about we start by changing that first?

But nobody was fired…

Posted: August 26, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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If you’re not already familiar with it, the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship is…a floating pile of garbage.

Not literally…or maybe, littorally? The Littoral Combat Ship was seen as a new, sleek, fast ship to replace the old minesweepers and patrol crafts. It could drive super fast and would be able to change out mission modules, meaning one day it could be oriented towards minesweeping, and the next day it could hunt down submarines. Even better, it would have a small crew, so the Navy would save on manpower.

If that all sounds too good to be true…it was. Many people pointed this out at the time, but were called naysayers for doing so. Yet here we are today watching the Navy retire a Littoral Combat Ship after only five years of service (compared to the 20+ years we get from Destroyers, Cruisers, and basically any other ship).

USS SIOUX CITY, decommissioned after only 5 years.

Crying about this fact gets us nowhere. What I want to do is point out the hypocrisy in the Navy in how it treats it’s flag officers. With the LCS as a raging dumpster fire, at least one of the manufacturers, Austal USA, had the good sense to make its CEO resign. Would the Navy do this? Let’s look at some of the LCS programs past leadership:

  • Rear Admiral John Neagley took over the program around 2016. He apparently wrote many of the requirements for LCS back in the day, so you’d think he could turn it around. Nope! He wasn’t fired either, instead, he retired and now works at ICI Services.
  • In 2012, Rear Admiral John Murdoch said “I am not concerned at all about any of the deficiencies…in terms of my ability to correct them before the ship leaves the Great Lakes,” concerning serious problems onboard USS FORT WORTH while it was in Lake Michigan. The FORT WORTH commissioned in 2012 and was retired in 2022 after only 10 years in service. John Murdoch retired without issue and now works at Lockheed Martin.
  • Rear Admiral Robert Nowakowski took over in 2020, and after two years…the Navy cancelled the anti-submarine mission package on LCS due to overspending. Rear Admiral Nowakowski is still in the Navy and hasn’t had anything negative happen to his career.

So the Navy has a massively failing program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars on ships that cannot fight or even stay afloat after only a few years. Its leadership gets punished…nope. It’s leaders, because they wear stars on their shoulders, get to retire to fat pensions with no repercussions whatsoever.

None. Zip. Zilch.

Meanwhile, Sailors work themselves to death trying to maintain vessels they can’t get training on and aren’t properly sourced.

These Admirals should be ashamed of themselves and the pain they caused these Sailors, their families and the impact to our Naval Power.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency, because those agencies want you to keep thinking that everything is fine and you should just keep handing over your tax dollars like the good little sheep you are without asking hard questions.

Public Schools align with Satan

Posted: August 19, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in local issues, local stuff, Uncomfortable Truths
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Satan has two interesting strategies to spread his influence among humanity. The first involves pretending that he doesn’t exist. There are many people that laugh at the idea of Satan existing at all, and who instead argue that its “bad humans” that account for the evil in the world. These people don’t even like using the word “evil” because it implies there is a “good,” and they instead argue that actions are judged based on human standards at the time, instead of any sort of absolute judgement.

While this strategy works well, it pushes Satan to stay hidden and out of site. It’s far better to operate in the open, and that seems to be the current strategy. But why would rational human beings allow the literal Prince of Darkness, who promises to enslave men and women, to openly influence them?

Easy. Satan becomes cool. He stands for libertarian ideals of free and open speech. Heck, he even has an “X” account. He even manages to get applause in Chesapeake, VA, where school board members voted to continue to allow the club to meet on school grounds. From our parish’s FlockNote:

Unfortunately, the school board voted 7-1 (with one member absent) to allow all non-exempt clubs to include the After School Satan Club to use Chesapeake Public Schools facilities. There were 40 speakers that were signed up to speak, and only five spoke against the After School Satan Club and prohibiting facility use. Most of the speakers and the attendees represented the Good News Club (the Bible club), a wrestling club, and other various clubs such as a soccer club and the girl scouts. There were also about 10 Satanists present, with several of them speaking. There were only four Catholics present by my count, and all spoke out against the After School Satan Club and non-exempt clubs using school facilities. At the end of the meeting, the room was full of applause for the board’s decision to allow non-exempt clubs to meet.

The rosary rally had good attendance, despite the heat, with around 30 people showing up to pray. Four Satanists showed up as a counter-protest at the end of our rally, and there was no interaction between the groups. Thank you to everyone who showed up and those who were unable to make it that were praying from afar. Even thought the vote did not go as we had hoped, I know our prayers are not wasted.

On a positive note, I asked Rose Bastet (the leader of the After School Satan Club and a Satanic minister) if the After School Satan Club planned to meet on the third Thursday of the month as they did during the last school year. I said that we wanted to continue praying the rosary. She said that the school district was giving them a lot of trouble, and she wasn’t sure if they were going to meet at this time. She didn’t go into detail as to what that meant exactly. The attitude of the Satanists was completely reversed from the last time the school board allowed them to meet several months ago. Several months ago they were overjoyed and cheerful at the decision. After this meeting, they did not seem happy.

The only board member who voted to get rid of all non-exempt clubs to include the After School Satan Club was Samuel Boone. The member who was absent was Brittany Walker. The members who voted to allow the clubs to meet with no changes in the policy were: Angela Swygert, Thomas Mercer, Amanda Dean, Michael Lamonea, John McCormick, Norman Pool, and Kim Scott. 

Amanda Dean tried to get a reclassification of what a non-exempt club was as she seemed to be surprised that the wrestling club would be impacted. She and Samuel Boone were the only two members who voted to reclassify, with the other members voting to not reclassify as they were wary of legal repercussions. Amanda Dean has been the most outspoken board member about getting the After School Satan Club out of schools so her vote to ultimately allow the clubs was surprising. Perhaps she voted the way she did due to the hostile crowd or realizing that the only option on the table would get rid of more clubs than she had previously realized.

Stay tuned for further details on this situation. We will plan to have rosary rallies in the future should we determine when the After School Satan Club is meeting. It is especially disheartening that the people of this city erupted into applause when all the clubs were able to meet. We need to continue to pray, do penance, and acts of reparation as it seems clear that things like wrestling are more important to the residents of this city than keeping Satan out of the public sphere.

Interestingly enough, if you go to the Facility Use rules for Chesapeake Public School, you can find this restriction:

The described use would conflict with a policy, procedure, or the mission of Chesapeake Public Schools.

Not sure when the mission of public schools aligned with Satan, but apparently they aren’t in “conflict” with the school? That doesn’t bode well for any of us going forward.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. Pray for America and for Chesapeake today, we certainly need it.

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