The single worst training session I endured at Fort Gordon was a bizarre experience. The instructors said the scenario was we were citizens in a country with a strict class system and the only way to move up was by trading tokens without talking. It became clear that the only way to win was to cheat by lying about how many tokens you had since the instructors never counted them. It appeared the whole point of the exercise was to imply that the American system is inherently unjust, which is a truly odd thing to be teaching to American soldiers. I could give many other examples of things like this. So much time in today’s Army is wasted on training that has nothing to do with making better soldiers.
There were fun times as well. For Halloween of 2018, we were allowed to wear our costumes to work. I spent my whole shift dressed up as Toucan Sam, the cartoon cereal mascot. It was fun to be dressed like that while listening to enemy chatter.
There’s not much what I can say about what I actually did other than I listened to what the bad guys talked about and tried to translate it. I wasn’t so great at transcription, but I was pretty good at finding interesting things. The best part was that I worked with one of the best Arabic linguists in the Department of Defense and got to hear all his stories about the various idiots he had to outwit over his long career. He, like most NSA civilian employees, is a veteran. In fact, most of the people who work for NSA are active-duty military and most of the rest are veterans. I think the US public’s generally negative perception of NSA would change if they knew that. I remember jumping on the anti-NSA bandwagon in 2013 after the Snowden leaks. When I worked for the NSA and saw what it actually did, I began to see NSA employees as unsung heroes.
From his stories, it seemed that the veteran linguist did not like the military and one night, I asked why he stayed in so long. Long story short, he was forced to be the breadwinner for his family at a young age and he had to keep his job somehow. Later, when the military was making me miserable, I saw that I did not need it the way he did.
He told me a story about his time in Greece. Another guy there was a short, alcoholic computer genius. He would test microchips in a homemade lab in his kitchen, find the design flaws, then write back to the manufacturers for a reward of a few thousand dollars. Once he was late for a flight, so my mentor went to check on him. He found the computer whiz sprawled out on the floor surrounded by bottles of ouzo. I don’t know whether that story really happened or if he made it up on the spot just for me. He met a lot of drunks over his military career and probably guessed I was too.
I greatly enjoyed being in the company of people who shared my interests in math, codes, computers, and foreign languages. It was also a lot of fun to read through the NSA archive and learn things that have been classified for a long time. Some of it is truly intriguing and incredible. Alas, it will not be public knowledge for a long time. Everybody who works for NSA has to take a vow of silence in a ceremony that reminded me a bit of what happens when a guy becomes a made-man in the mafia. It was a little scary and kind of cool, much like the counterintelligence polygraph test I had to take. I admit it was a little fun to be strapped into a chair with various gizmos and wires hanging off me. All I could think of was the scene from Goldfinger where James Bond says “do you expect me to talk?” while strapped down with a laser beam steadily coming closer to him.
A sailor I met at DLI was assigned to the same section as me. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the best Arabic linguist to graduate DLI in 2017. His speaking prowess was unbelievable. Unfortunately, it took forever to get his NSA work computer set up. I could tell he was getting frustrated, so invited him to sit with me so we could listen together. He left the section unexpectedly, never to return. I suspect he had some kind of mental breakdown, a common affliction among new NSA linguists.
When I reached my third year in the Army, I thought to myself that I should stay in, because I had never had a job last that long before. And so I prepared to end BLC, the Basic Leadership Course, so I could get promoted to sergeant. BLC ought to be called the Army IQ Reduction Program. Not only is it the worst class in the Army, it’s the worst class I’ve taken in my entire life. It may even be the worst class theoretically possible. It’s 23 days in a row of 5 AM wake-ups, shouting slogans in unison, and watching PowerPoint all day. About the only good thing that happened to me there was meeting an Army Ranger and Special Forces sniper who were among my instructors. I guess game recognize game. The 5 AM wake-ups were particularly unpleasant as at that time I had been on the night shift for several months. And just when I was starting to get good at the job, I spent 3,000 hours for, I had to take this dumb class or else risk not getting promoted.
It was disappointing to meet a National Guardsmen there who was clearly obese and who had failed a walking test there by trying to run when he thought no one was looking. That’s probably the most pathetic thing I ever heard about a soldier I met myself, and my respect for the National Guard took a nosedive. He also decided it was fun to see how much he could anger me, and it didn’t stop until I made it clear to him that the most useful thing he could do in combat was get his brains blown out so a more competent soldier could use his corpse as a sandbag. His equally obnoxious accomplice didn’t stop bothering me until I put my hand on him and gave him a look that made him whimper in fright.
The problem with any, and every, thing in the Military & Intel Industrial Complex is the drinking of the kool aid. It enables one to view the mundane or worse as noble. It is an amazing demonstration of the human capacity for self-deception.
That was something that stuck out to me in Snowden’s book. Even after everything that happened to him, he still has this starry eyed admiration for what the intelligence community *could* be or *should* be, if it just weren’t for those bad apples and bad policies. It’s hard to hold it against him though, since it was that very same idiotic, naive optimism that led him to blow the whistle in the first place. It just goes to show you though, if you can’t even make a convert out of that guy…
I remember being a bit shocked when I found out I would be assigned to NSA. At the time, I had no idea it had such a strong connection with the military.
Fun fact: comedy musician Tom Lehrer was assigned to be an NSA mathematician after being drafted into the Army. He invented Jello shots to get around his base’s ban on alcohol.
***
Despite holding a master’s degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked a high school diploma, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of Specialist Third Class, which he described as being a “corporal without portfolio”.[19] These experiences became fodder for songs, such as “The Wild West is Where I Want to Be” and “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”.[20] In 2020 Lehrer publicly revealed that he had been assigned to the NSA; since the mere fact of the NSA’s existence was classified at the time, Lehrer found himself in the position of implicitly using nuclear weapons work as a cover story for something more sensitive.
***
He was most likely breaking codes.
Huh. My dad introduced me to Tom Lehrer when I was a kid. I didn’t know any of that.
I love Derpy.
That is all.
I like to say NSA is the only part of the government that actually listens. The sense of humor there is amusing.
In other news, my mom was able to walk 16 feet today. Her recovery will take a long time it seems. I’ll see her again for xmas.
Good to hear your mother is recovering. It may not be 100 % but we can hope for the best.
We saw Fetterman go from being a turnip to speak with coherence in just a matter of a couple months.
Good.
Very cool.
OOTL, but best wishes for your mom’s recovery.
She got a serious infection and had to get hospitalized on Thanksgiving, spent a few days on a ventilator, needed dialysis a few times…bottom line, she’s lucky to be alive.
And thanks.
Jesus. An improperly treated recurrent urinary tract infection that became drug resistant and went septic is what killed my dad after 3 weeks in the ICU, so I know how that can go. Glad to hear she made it through, and again, best wishes for a good recovery.
Ditto. Best wishes to DerpMom.
Great to hear that Mama Derp is on the mend.
Huzzah!
Good wishes for continued recovery ❤️🩹
You go, mama!
Since WW2, has the NSA accomplished anything of value? Anything at all?
I know they take credit for getting Bin Laden. Some bullshit story concocted by the Obama administration about female intelligence analysts who slaved away over the data sifting through all the bullshit noise to finally get him. In reality, some Pakistani officer turned him in to get a fat dollar reward.
I think it’s funny when you watch the hearings on UFO’s and shit, they talk about the CIA’s involvement openly and no one ever bothers to ask why the CIA is involved. If there were crashes of alien craft on US soil, that’s out of the purview of the CIA. They shouldn’t be running any programs, let alone the proven counter-intelligence ones related to UFO’s, on domestic soil. But no one in power bats an eye.
NSA tech was responsible for locating Che Guevara via radio direction finding. I’m glad he got smoked. Bin Laden was also killed with NSA help. They tracked the phone calls of one of his couriers.
Broadly speaking though, it’s another bloated government bureaucracy. The cost of US nuclear deterrence is about $50 billion per year, and I see no reason for the total defense/intel budget to be more than double or triple that. Right now, it’s about 15x that.
Supposedly, about half the UFO reports from the 50s and 60s were related to the U2 spy plane program, which was run by CIA. That’s probably the main reason for their involvement.
See, there are conflicting reports that the NSA ever tracked any courier. Seymour M. Hersh says that was all bullshit, and I’m inclined to believe him.
The CIA ran counterintelligence operations against American citizens on US soil. Literally destroyed lives of stupidly patriotic Americans. Fed disinformation throughout the entire UFO research community. That’s blatantly illegal, and they’re involvement today is still illegal.
I read the classified NSA report on how bin Laden was caught. It was a present we all got from the director one year. The full story has not been told. NSA technology was definitely used to locate bin Laden.
I also read the classified NSA report on the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown. That one was really interesting.
Like the rest of the milico, CIA should be greatly downsized.
milico (milly-ko) = military-industrial complex
I would take anything Hersh writes with a few tons of salt. He’s a journo after all.
If there was a public story made up by the Obama administration (and the official story stinks of propaganda to me), I’d expect any internal report issued by the NSA and readily available to match it. Maybe it’s true. I haven’t read it and I’m not asking you to disclose. The tell as I’d see it is that they picked a group of female analysts to highlight as the main heroes. A group of successful career women who were obsessed and determined no matter what to find him.
I trust the journalist with half a century of experience whose main bias seems to be fuck the government more than any government agency.
Hersh’s story is different from both the public version and the classified NSA version.
I saw a clip from Pakistani TV where one of their retired generals boasted something like: before, we used American money to defeat Russia. Now we are using American money to defeat America.
I know from personal experience that low-level military personnel will lie and falsify documents about minor things. It doesn’t surprise me that generals and presidents would tell even bigger lies.
This article pokes many holes in the Hersh story:
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159377
***
On many levels Hersh’s article fails the commonsense test when it comes to its claims about Pakistan’s recent history. Its claims of a vast, joint conspiracy between the ISI and Pakistani military on the one hand, and many US agencies and military services on the other hand, don’t gel with the contentious relationship between the two countries. There are just too many competing actors in these two countries’ intelligence and military services to pull off such a united operation that ended in the humiliation of the Pakistanis (their top generals offered to resign to Pakistani parliament afterwards), all for the goal of assisting the American president in a deceitful publicity campaign.
In addition, Americans, Saudis, and Pakistanis (all said to have played a role in this deception) live in societies with ready access to the internet. In this era of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowdon’s revelations on the NSA spying, investigative journalism, etc. it requires a suspension of commonsense to accept that, for over four years, this vast international conspiracy was kept secret from the peoples of all three countries.
***
That time the CIA tried to recruit me in high school:
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/11/my-cia-memento.html
Noted dumb fuck Rashard Mendenhall (you’re probably like who, and then I’d tell you he’s the RB who fumbled the ball when the Steelers were driving for the go-ahead score against the Packers in the Super Bowl and you’d probably still be like….who?) decided to offer his opinion on race relations. Or something.
Apparently he thinks he’s better than Tom Brady or something. And that Belichick shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on football because he can’t cover Randy Moss. Or something.
My favorite Socrates Mendenhall quote is on Osama Bin Laden, though, and celebrations of his death.
Then there was the time when he called Ben Roethlisberger racist and said Antonio Brown’s problem was that he had to catch passes from a racist QB. But then he revealed this was really a gotcha argument and his point was that people weren’t considering things from Brown’s perspective.
There was some controversy in hockey about a rule saying coaches don’t need to know how to skate. Or some such. In any case, I’m sure many coaches can’t do many of the things their players do.
I remember the Stars won the cup and a few presidents trophies with Ken Hitchcock who was never a player, but generally they are former players.
In football, the best coaches tend to have been guys who were middling players at best. Usually ones who couldn’t even hack it in the NFL.
His argument is all kinds of stupid, though if you are willing to just laugh at it it does create some fun and funny scenarios. The white team would be fucked at CB unless we go back to like the 1950’s and the black team would have really shitty special teams. And then you have the mixed race players.
It’s Dave Chappelle’s racial draft in football, only this clown was dead serious.
I kind of think that’s true in other sports as well and — in fact — even in other things.
I am much better at teaching things that I have had to struggle to learn.
When Gretzky became a coach, I thought .. meh. that guys is just too naturally talented.
Same in baseball. Of the “all-time greats” of the last fifty years, Dusty Baker stuck around in the majors for nineteen seasons, while Joe Torre was a nine-time All-Star with a .297 career average. Everyone else, from La Russa to Lasorda to Showalter, was marginal at best, if they made the bigs at all.
Hoops is a similar story. The best coaches seem to have been serviceable players, but not superstars. Phil Jackson and Pat Riley come to mind. The superstars who stick around after their playing days are over seem to be a mixed bag. Larry Bird was probably the best of the bunch, as a winning coach and a good executive. Isaiah Thomas, not so much.
This might make an interesting post for a sportsball nerdfight when Swiss is in desperate need of content.
Animal’s Roman boot camp story that was posted earlier today got me thinking about my basic training experiences. I was almost 31 when I joined and was older than almost everyone there. That and the fact that I had spent months walking on a treadmill all day to lose 50 pounds made it easier to shrug off the various hardships there.
You know you’ve broken a drill sergeant’s spirit when they stop yelling at you and start saying “please”. I even got a “sorry” out of one once. That was probably because I was holding a loaded machine gun at the time. The training changes a bit each year. When I did it, we spent a day at range to shoot an M249 machine gun and an M203 grenade launcher. Each soldier got to shoot a belt of 100 rounds on the machine gun and 5 simulated grenade rounds. They were packed with a bit of explosives and colored smoke so you could see where the grenade hit. So there were fun moments. Picking up 20,000 shell casings later that day was not much fun.
I have a problem trying to picture today’s military with my own experiences. Too long ago, too many changes and the draft being over. I can’t compare today’s volunteer Army with the Viet Nam era soldier.
When I used to see the recruiting ads that said, “We do more before 9 AM than most people do all day” I always asked “Why”
Like with the previous slogan “Fun, travel, adventure”, they were trying to imply being in the Army was exciting and thus desirable.
This video about the Indian military is funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVa5CNvLVVU
FTA had a different meaning amongst the draftees.
It was a popular thing for them to write on their helmets. Hackworth mentioned it in his book.
There’s a minimalist recruiting ad from the 70s I like. Nothing fancy, lasts about a minute, shows off all the branches and some of their toys. The pitch was basically: serve your country and get money for college and job training.
I dunno. People are people. The bits of flair change, but the tune is the same.
My time was kind of in the middle. Still had M60’s and LCE at the start and more than one guy who had served in Vietnam. If anything, I think we had more in common with the Vietnam era than the immediate post-draft anything goes Army. Which feels more and more like today.
Husband is getting his rotator cuff repaired tomorrow. He should be getting frequent flyer miles with this ortho.
Good luck! 🍀👍
Another guy there was a short, alcoholic computer genius. He would test microchips in a homemade lab in his kitchen, find the design flaws, then write back to the manufacturers for a reward of a few thousand dollars. – this guy is trying to steal our jobs
Good morning glibbies…
I will do something out of character and add a music link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yiq4ocwQJs
whaddup
A visual aid for this installment: fat me and thin me
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2023/12/fat-me-circa-2015.html
And yes, I’m holding an African python in the “thin me” pic.
***
The Central African rock python (Python sebae) is a species of large constrictor snake in the family Pythonidae. The species is native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of 10 living species in the genus Python.
Africa’s largest snake and one of the eight largest snake species in the world (along with the green anaconda, reticulated python, Burmese python, Southern African rock python, Indian python, yellow anaconda and Australian scrub python), specimens may approach or exceed 6 m (20 ft). The southern species is generally smaller than its northern relative but in general, the Central African rock python is regarded as one of the longest species of snake in the world.[3] The snake is found in a variety of habitats, from forests to near deserts, although usually near sources of water. The snake becomes dormant during the dry season. The Central African rock python kills its prey by constriction and often eats animals up to the size of antelope, occasionally even crocodiles. The snake reproduces by egg-laying. Unlike most snakes, the female protects her nest and sometimes even her hatchlings.
The snake is widely feared, though it is nonvenomous and very rarely kills humans. Although the snake is not endangered, it does face threats from habitat reduction and hunting. Some cultures in sub-Saharan Africa consider it a delicacy, which may pose a threat to its population.
***
They don’t eat pythons in Tanzania. I would have tried it if it had been available.
Good morning all!
Let the seasonally appropriate, but questionable, music begin.
What’s It To Ya Chorus.
Share and enjoy!
Good morning y’all!
😁🎄☕
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4LjWvGft8
🎶🎶
More acoustic goodness. I don’t think I put this up before. So good.
how do you people kno0w this obscure music.
Meh, that was a fairly big Alt Rock song in it’s day.
In countries that have sent men to the moon anyway.
Stone Sour was an American rock band formed in Des Moines, Iowa, – nothing from Des Moines, Iowa is fairly big
The song was big, it was even featured in a major motion picture!
Even featured in a major motion picture AND a Taco Bell commercial!
Good morning, Sean and Beau, and good afternoon, Pie!
Morning.
Since my dinner has stayed down, I figure I can risk breakfast.
Good morning, U! Glad you seem to be improving. 🤞
So how are things with you and yours?
Hangin’ in there. Remaining gift books for oldest sister & BIL are due to be delivered today and tomorrow. Hit a minor glitch in payroll yesterday, but that should be fixed pretty quickly.
🤞
No one likes payroll problems.
Well…this would have been in the affected employees’ favor: because our med insurance premiums went up so much last month, the big bosses decided to give enrollees a “benefit allowance” of $200 with this last pay of the year. Our account manager offered to plug it in to our pay data early, but I said it would probably get overwritten when I imported all the timesheet data, and our payroll manager agreed. As far as I knew, we’d left it that I’d plug in the allowance myself. I did so, but when I got the final “draft” for approval, everyone was showing the allowance twice. 🙄
🤦♂️
Mornin’ GT and all.
Good morning, JI!
Morning, JI
Mornign!
I have links to share @8:30 EGT.
Sausage?
No, I’m using those for dinner tomorrow night.
While the world seems so full of misery I had coffee yesterday with an old friend of 70 years. We reminisced about the days long ago and the friends gone (most of them) and our antics of our youth. Drinking/driving/hangovers at work, you know, the wasted days and wasted nights.
Yet here we are, in spite of all our foibles. Some of the good old days may not have been so good after all.
You know the good old days weren’t always good,
Tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems…