The Times are Changing

dylanShits about to get real my friends.

I am sorry my updates have been slowing down the last couple of months. Sometimes life gets to a certain speed and things become reorganized in a way that prevents us from following up in a timely manner. I make no excuses for the things I can change, I’ll just march forward.

I have a shit ton on my mind this morning. I will warn you now, I have a gut feeling this update is going into the TLDR stratosphere. I’ll try and organize my thoughts in a way that you Monday to Friday nine to fiver types may be able to break out bits and pieces and enjoy my awesomeness all week. If you can’t get a good laugh, a “fuck yeah” or a tear out of this then my mojo is severely lacking.

Might as well attack the first thing on my mind. This government shut down.

I personally don’t give a shit about the shut down. What I find interesting is how our mainstream media reports about it and the general idiocy of the population of this country. The blame game going back and forth is laughable. Republicans this Democrats that.

There is good and bad on both sides of the political aisle. There is equal blame to be placed on both republicans and democrats. This isn’t a new development. This has been true for more years then any of us reading this have been alive. The real problem we have as a country is the shit bird we elected into the White House. I am sorry folks he’s the President and our Commander in Chief and rightfully I should show a hell of a lot more respect for the office then referring to him as a shit bird but I simply can not. Not as an American. Not as a Marine Corps veteran, not as a patriot and certainly not as a simple law abiding (most of the time anyway) tax paying citizen.

President Obama (and I use the term loosely) was elected to office on the promise of reforming medical care insurance and coverage to people of all walks of life. A nice idea in principal but none the less we ended up with the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare for short. Its essentially an abortion of a law/bill. It doesn’t fix the problems with healthcare costs or insurance but merely places (mandates) more risk onto the insurance carriers and the free market healthcare industry. Anyway its a shitty bill and law. Does anyone here remember the “we have to pass the bill to find out whats in it.” Yes that ought to give you an idea of the capacity of our elected representatives that should be looking out for our interests.

Anyway in a nutshell Obamacare through smoke and mirrors and a heavy dose of “party” bullshit gives the illusion that healthcare is affordable and cheap and now everyone can be covered. If you have half a brain and have done the least bit of research into this subject furthermore you are capable of balancing your checkbook, then you know Obamacare is a pack of fucking lies. Someone HAS to pay for the additional coverage. Someone now has to pay for all the people with existing health related problems the insurance companies have to by law cover. Obamacare does NOT work. Its not fiscally sustainable. President Obama going on five years of holding the highest office in the land can not and has not put together a fiscal budget to run this country yet wants us to believe that Obamacare will somehow magically work?! Come on, say it with me folks. “What the Motherfuck?”

During President Obama’s first term when the bill was signed into law, many states tried to fight it. The bill went to the supreme court. None the less parts of the bill were deemed legal, and we found ourselves stuck with it legally for the time being anyway.

Now we’re in the middle of its implementation. The only option left to our representatives to try and save ourselves from this abomination of a healthcare law is to deal with its actual funding. The idea is if we can’t repeal the horrible law, then we can simply not fund the law. It would theoretically go nowhere. Money makes the word go around.

Our congress which by our very own CONSTITUTION is in place to dictate via a vote of our elected representatives, what we (United States Government because WE are the Government) can spend money on. In a last ditch effort congress decided NOT to fund Obamacare. We expect our congress to do this. Our constitution mandates that congress decides where our money goes. Well our congress voted not to fund Obamacare. Our congress also voted not to fund any other government activity until some of the more detrimental to our economy and freedom portions of Obamacare are repealed and or modified. The only problem is our President whom we elected to lead our nation of both democrats and republicans will NOT in any way sit down and listen and or adjust his very personal but equally bad healthcare law to something more economically feasible and sustainable for future generations.

Here is what the media who loves Obama does not tell you. Our congress has decided and voted affirmatively to fund all the other important parts of the government with the exception of Obamacare and keep things moving. Mr Harry Reid in the Senate will not bring to a vote to ratify any of the congressional votes/bills to keep the government running while the Obamacare law gets no funding. He wants an everything or nothing type of deal from congress. Mr. Harry Reid is a democrat long on the dick of Mr. Obama for all you keeping score at home.

You’re probably now thinking “Brock what exactly is the Presidents place in all this, why the unadulterated hatred and disdain?” I’ll tell you. A President can be either a democrat or republican but once you get to office your job as President is to represent all of us. This one does NOT.

The President refuses to sit down with congress and adjust Obamcare. He will not even talk about its adjustment or modification. Its his baby and in his warped mind his legacy. President Obama thinks if he sits with congress and adjusts portions of it to more suitably do what its supposed to do, it will as a bad and horrible law, go away and in the end Mr. Obama is nothing. That part remains to be seen but that is what this egomaniac thinks in his head.

But wait there is more!

Now that the government is shut down and at a standstill President Obama in his lack to admit to his fallibility and that his healthcare law is severely flawed, wants to somehow place the blame on the republicans and congress for the shut down. Remember kids our Constitution mandates our congress decides where our money goes. Remember kids our congress voted and came up with plans to fund all other important parts of our government while we fix Obamacare. Can you guess who says “no” and keeps things as they are?

But wait there is even more!

To try and sway the idiocy of the population of this country even more (the dumb ones are generally supporters of President Obama) President Obama has chosen to use the government shut down to place MORE and undue strain on the american people. President Obama wants to hurt the american people with the shut down (needlessly mind you) to try and place more stress on congress and the republicans and get them to concede to his horrible healthcare law as is. The law simply does not work as written. A child with an eighth grade education in simple economics can tell you this.

Since the government shut down, national parks, monuments, and memorials all around the country do not have the staff or infrastructure to run. (duh government employees) However some of these parks, monuments, and memorials have no (ZERO) personnel to run them anyway and should be open to the public. More importantly have remained open to the pubic in the past during similar shut downs. This time to place more pressure on you and me the american people, President Obama has ordered the barricade and shut down of important memorials such as the World War II memorial in Washington. The Lincoln Memorial, The MARINE CORPS Memorial, The Vietnam Wall the list goes on. The most important thing to understand is these memorials didn’t in the past have any real personnel to run. They are outdoor monuments and memorials.

These memorials and monuments belong to you and me. For Christ sakes private citizens are taking over the grounds maintenance with their own lawnmowers!  They have never been shut down in the past. But to somehow inflict more pain on you and me and get us to somehow mistake and place the blame on our congress for this shut down Obama has barricaded the memorials and monuments away from mostly veterans who fought and served this country.  All this over a fucking horrible healthcare law he refuses to sit down and try and adjust and fix. Obama is having 90 year old world war two veterans arrested who chose to ignore his asinine barricades and enter the monuments and memorials. Did you just fucking read what I wrote? Please for the love of Christ, read this paragraph three times!

Well this weekend some veterans showed up to Washington and they had a message for President Obama.Barrycades

Take your barricades and GO FUCK YOURSELF!

What do I think about the shut down? Let it stay shut the hell down. Don’t let the mainstream media fool you into thinking this mess isn’t the President’s fault. He does not represent all of us. He is not a leader, and frankly he is an embarrassment to this nation to which the likes of William Taft and Jimmy Carter can sit back and say “Jesus this guy truly is a world class asshole!”

All this because President Obama refuses to sit down and talk about his baby, the AHA. Remember kids the man claims his Obamacare is so perfect and deserves not even the slightest of review that he is willing to arrest 90 year old veterans who fought and gave parts of their bodies for this country and freedom. Remember the same program that had three and a half years and $600+ million dollars to set up the online exchanges that in two weeks have yet to be able to sign up people for the fucking insurance that is being mandated upon us.

“Well Brock, so many people believe in Obamacare and are trying to sign up they are overloading the system.” BULL FUCKING SHIT. Do NOT let the mainstream media or the Obama administration trick you into believing this load of crap.

Yes the system is being overloaded. Not because we believe and want it. Its because Obama made it the goddamn LAW! Most of us even in our disdain for Obama are law abiding citizens. Of course we are going to sign up. He made it law. Yet in three and a half years and spending over $600 million dollars to put a system in place this administration couldn’t make a system to support the load it would be under starting on day one? Are you kidding me? When was the last time Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, came out with a product that after two weeks still couldn’t do its most basic and fundamental task? Yet we should all think Obamacare deserves no scrutiny!? President Obama can’t even sign us up into his fucking system, yet somehow magically it will not bankrupt the nation into oblivion.

Sorry folks, I’ll be the first person to say I generally hate all politicians since they’re all scumbags, but this is not a congress or a republican problem or their fault. This is a last ditch effort to save us from the abyss of fiscal insanity and erosions of simple personal freedoms. What we are lacking as a nation is a true leader who has all of our interests at heart.

How hard is it to see the emperors real clothes when he sends coffee and port a potties to occupy wall street, but arrests 90 year old war veterans outside memorials and monuments erected to the very freedoms this scumbag has never in his life worked for nor earned? Not by birthright, not by action, and certainly not be deed.

We have come a long way, and times are a changing thats for sure. Which side will you come down on? Me? I try and rely on no one but when it comes time and time will come, I’ll do what needs to be done for me, my family, and friends. I will not surrender to this bullshit and allow those to take from me that of which I have earned. Not my money, not my freedom.

We’re mid way through October. My month, the awesome month. The weather is breaking so part of me thinks about firing up the oven and cake. I like cake. I like pie too. Then part of me thinks, eh. I don’t know what I am in the mood for. Everything looks nice nothing looks nice. Except a nice meatball sub. Nothing in the world is as nice as a good meatball sub except maybe the Indy 500.

I do not usually pass out candy on Halloween. I mean I have tried in the past to show some spirit. I love Halloween and the holiday. I have bought the candy with intentions to pass it out. I usually end up eating 3/4 of the shit myself. I know I am going to do it when I buy the candy too. Yet I still go through the motions. I buy one of the big bags of candy, eat most of the contents leading up to Halloween with the rationalization I’ll just buy more. I never buy more. I get to Halloween look and see that I only have a small amount left and figure to myself no sense in passing this little bit out. I just turn out lights, not answer the door and keep the last bit for myself. A viscous cycle that repeats itself year after year. See I have no kids to whore out and pull in my own pillow case of sugary goodness. My eternal bachelorhood and freedom to do what I want when I want and all the toys that go along with that lifestyle does have some draw backs.

Mostly I love Halloween for the parties. My birthday is October 30th (shameless plug mark your calendars) Devils night. When I tell people this, usually its a look and response like “yeah no shit, it all makes sense now.” Anyway, my birthday and then Halloween how can one go wrong with that? Generally over the years I have combined the celebrations together. There’s a few of us all with birthdays within a week of each other so more times then not we combine the parties into one night somewhere between all of us getting together and its nice. What I like most about Halloween however is now that I have some young nieces to see and enjoy the wickedness and teach to egg houses and light bags of dog shit on fire. I also enjoy the adult component of Halloween. What I have learned in life is that for the most part adult Halloween is women dressing like sluts.

Its the one day of the year that its perfectly ok for girls to dress rather provocatively. Now most of the women reading this right now are rolling their eyes in their head thinking “Brock doesn’t know shit.” No its true there are a few things I am a master at, and sexy sluts are one of them. You can try and convince yourself otherwise but I KNOW. Going to go as Sookie Stackhouse? mmmm hmmm. Or maybe little Bo Peep and her Sheep from the childhood nursery rhyme? Sure but in my Bo Peep or Little Red Ridinghoods in childhood neither of those ladies were skipping down the lane in sexy as hell thigh high stockings with the seam on the back and fuck me pumps. And all you ladies that have done this look I thank you and love you so goddamn much.

This year I want to see cowboy boots, shorts, and titties. I am on a country kick.  Pretend you’re Taylor Swift, or Daisy Duke I don’t care. Now that I think about it and if I am going to be truthful this has nothing to do with Halloween and I’d call this a Friday night. However if you need an excuse to dress up a little outside of your comfort zone and have the stems to pull it off, know that Halloween is there for you. I am there for you! I know slutty and Halloween is here for you.

These are the things on my brain this Monday morning. I should probably close this up before I cross the line of unmanageably too long and fuck this I am not reading that manifesto garbage.

Let ‘er rip tater chips.

Eyeballs! Snap Sir!

Today is Memorial Day. While most enjoy the long weekend, sales, family, BBQ I too enjoy those things, but I also think back to my time as a US Marine in service to the country. I often wonder about where some of my old military buddies are now in life and those that never came home.

You see when I was deployed in the early nineties during the first Gulf War and some other small tactical operations around the world protecting American assets in Liberia or Israel most of the men around me physically came home. Its just in some cases that their minds never did.

I had a buddy named Benjamin Antaran. Big Filipino and Samoan from San Francisco. Good guy good sense of humor. We both got out about the same time in 1993. We’d catch up on the phone every few months. His dad was a cop. Ben became a cop and worked in the courthouse. From time to time when talking to Ben on the phone he would ask me about things we saw “over there” and as Marines we’d talk about those things we saw or did which in general we never really could explain or open up to civilians. At the time I wouldn’t classify Ben as being troubled about what happened but the more I talked to him I knew he was going through his own battles reconciling things in his mind. At the time pretty normal I thought.

We all settle and come to terms with extreme things whether its scenes of combat, hurt buddies, highway car accident trauma in our own ways. My father was a Marine in Vietnam. I grew up periodically being woken up in the middle of the night by my father moaning or yelling in his sleep and my mother waking him from nightmares. The only time I ever knew what my father did in Vietnam was when I was a late teen when his buddy and best man at his wedding who he was in the Marines with him came to visit and they rehashed some old times. No one talked about combat stress, PTSD, etc. Shell-shock was just a grainy old picture of WWI soldiers with thousand mile stare eyes.

I lost touch with Ben. He stopped calling. A year turned to three. I finally decided to try and track him down. I knew he worked for the San Francisco Sheriffs department. I knew he was married. I started searching the internet. Shit.

He blew his brains out with his pistol in front of his wife and father in-law. Accusations of infidelity, shoved his wife to get away from her during an argument, she calls cops, boom. It’s not the worst.

RochefordMeet my priest. Father Dennis Rocheford. LCMDR USN

I first met Father Rocheford sometime around 1990 when I was with 3rd Battalion 8th Marine Regiment attached to the 26th MEU. He was the battalion chaplain. In order to become a chaplain in the USMC you have to be a naval officer. You see Father Rocheford back in the day was a Marine. He was with the 1st Marines during TET in 1968. Fought in Hue City, Hill 881 at Khe sanh, was a radio operator for the famous MajGen Ray “e-tool” Smith. Of one hundred men in Father Rocheford’s company in Vietnam he was one of six that survived. Father Rocheford during Vietnam promised God if he survived he would not waste his life. He made it home, joined the seminary and became a priest. Went back into the service around 1987 and for the most part preached the Catholic faith to Marines who need it the most.

Father Rocheford was a hell of a Marine. Even though he was actually a Navy LtCMDR as far as any Marine I ever knew that knew him he was a Marine. Whenever we needed to get dressed up and put on Alpha’s with ribbons and awards there wasn’t anyone the Battalion Commander included who had more awards or prouder then Father Rocheford. Numerous purple hearts, bronze stars, combat action, unit citations. I think he had a ziplock bag of the ones he couldn’t fit on the uniform in his pocket, so that at least he had them on his person as to not be considered out of uniform. Chesty Puller himself would have given Father Rocheford a pass.

I can barely tell you what I had for dinner Friday night. I can tell you however before going ashore around a rather hostile embassy in civil war torn Liberia, in a mass with Father Rockeford a quote in the homily was “Greater love hath no man than this, than a man that lays down his life for his friends”. That stays with me and will for the rest of my life.

Father Rocheford went with the Marines as a chaplain to Iraq in 2007 during some pretty fierce fighting around Ramadi. I can’t tell you how many Marines this guy may have brought comfort to during those times.

Unfortunately in 2009, it was too much for Father Rocheford. For the Marine priest who prayed for and gave comfort to thousands of Marines heading into combat for over 20 years, whom only he himself knew what real combat looked like, took his own life by jumping off a bridge in Rhode Island. Who would pray and give comfort for he who gave the rest of us peace?

I have stopped looking up old buddies I served with. I can’t take playing the what if and why games in my head for months at a time when I find out they couldn’t deal with life afterward.

I don’t recount these men, or tell you these stories to somehow illustrate that we should be doing something special for them on Memorial Day, or Veterans day. Pretty much everyone I went in to the service with would agree, we do and or did it so others we love could stay home in freedom and do the good things in life without seeing the “shit” of war. Partly that and boys of a certain age and immortal sense of romantic adventure choose it. I say enjoy your long weekends on these holidays with loved ones but know someone gave the ultimate price. Some mother or father paid the highest price with a son or daughter.

Those that make it home but suffer in private about what they saw or did, are just paying rent on the ultimate price. You’re not going to fix them and in most cases you’re not going to help them. More times then not they don’t ask for your pity or help, but you can respect them. A simple wave, handshake, a nod. Mostly enjoy your weekend with your family and loved ones. Eat, drink, be merry. Shop and get a good deal on a TV. Do it all. As long as you know in the back of your head what was given and someone went forward and didn’t come back, and now more then ever someone went forward, came back, but they may not really be back.

People may thank me or people like me for my service. I generally keep my mouth shut and attempt to be gracious. It aint me. I aint no fortunate son. Much bigger and much better men need to be thanked, but they’re not here now.

2CEB

2CEB 2 MARDIV Somewhere in Turkey about 1992 Antaran 2nd from right kneeling

I’m in this picture can you guess where? Ben Antaran is too. This was how we rolled as Combat Engineers back in the day.

So enjoy the rest of your long holiday weekend. I know I will.

Let ‘er rip tater chips.
Semper Fidelis.