Fake News

Navy Food

There is a lot of press on the Navy and the conditions on its ships. Let’s talk about a few of them:

Water

  • An aircraft carrier makes about 400,000 gallons of water per day through distillation. The total amount of water used is not just for personnel use. Water use is prolific.
  • Galleys: Preparing roughly 18,000 meals daily, beverages, washing produce, cleaning equipment, and operating dishwashers.
  • Laundry: Several thousand people generate an enormous daily laundry load. This includes the main ship’s laundry, uniform washing, linens, towels, and medical laundry.
  • Aircraft maintenance: Fresh-water washing removes salt from aircraft and engines to prevent corrosion. The Navy considers this mission-essential even during water restrictions.
  • Steam catapults: Roughly 200 gallons’ water-equivalent per launch. One hundred launches would represent about 20,000 gallons.
  • Reactor and steam plants: High-purity makeup water replaces losses in the propulsion, electrical-generation, and auxiliary steam systems. Most water circulates repeatedly, but leakage, sampling, maintenance, and steam losses require replacement.
  • Medical and dental spaces: Sterilizers, scrub sinks, laboratory work, patient care, and sanitation.
  • Ship cleaning and sanitation: Galley decks, berthing, heads, workshops, food-service spaces, and garbage-processing areas.
  • Closed-loop machinery systems: Air-conditioning chilled water and other cooling or heating circuits normally recirculate their water, but require makeup water.
  • Potable-water-system maintenance: Tank cleaning, flushing repaired piping, testing, leakage, and maintaining tank reserves.

During my six years living on a carrier, we were constantly placed on water restrictions. There were days when we couldn’t shower. We heard a constant round of complaining from the CO that he wanted us to use less than 22 gallons per person, per day.

For that reason, the Navy has special shower heads for enlisted showers that require you to hold down a stiff button to get water. Showers that simply run like the ones in your home are referred to as “Hollywood showers” and are not permitted.

Food

The food on submarines is top notch. While the food on aircraft carriers isn’t as high quality, it’s still plentiful. There were multiple dining facilities. Let me demonstrate:

  • There are three dining facilities for officers (called wardrooms) onboard. I never worked or ate in any of them, so I can’t give more details than that.
  • The Captain’s mess is for the commanding officer to have private meals with anyone he invites to dine with him.
  • There is a similar dining facility called the Admiral’s mess for the embarked Admiral and his invitees.
  • There is a chief’s mess for Chief Petty Officers (E-7 through E-9)
  • There are three different dining halls for enlisted crew members (E-1 through E-6) called the mess decks: Forward, Aft, and the Bar (which was connected to and adjacent to the Aft mess decks)

The forward mess decks specialized in fast, grab and go items like hamburgers (sliders), hot dogs (rollers), cereal, boiled eggs, sandwiches made of ham, egg, and cheese, and other quick options.

The aft mess decks were for hot meals. There were usually multiple options there- two or more main dishes to choose from, sides, vegetables, bread, and dessert.

The bar was what it sounds like- a buffet option where salads, a taco bar, a baked potato bar were available. Sailors could assemble those items with common toppings.

Here is the schedule for the enlisted dining:

  • 0100-0330: The forward mess decks open for “Jet setters,” a meal of boiled eggs, cereal, and egg sandwiches.
  • 0400-0800: Breakfast on both the forward and aft mess decks
  • 1000-1200 The bar is open
  • 1100-1400 Lunch is served on both the forward and aft mess decks. Full lunch aft, sandwiches, burgers, and dogs as well as fries and sometimes pizza forward.
  • 1400-1600: The bar is open
  • 1600-1900: Forward and Aft mess decks open for dinner
  • 2100-0100: Aft mess decks open for “midrats” which is usually composed of leftovers from dinner, as well as cold cuts to make sandwiches.

There were choices, and as you can see, there was somewhere and something to eat 19.5 hours per day. In addition, there were multiple stores for sailors to purchase snacks, chips, candy bars, etc.. The Navy calls that stuff “geedunk” and it is sold onboard. The third deck has the ship’s “mall” where things like soap, uniform items, stationery, geedunk, and other things can be bought. It’s on the 3rd deck, next to the post office. Six floors higher, on the 03 level, there was the “Seven-11” where geedunk was for sale. It was located next to the ship’s barber shop, which offered free haircuts. On the second deck, next to the video arcade between the personnel offices and the aft mess decks, there were half a dozen soda and snack machines.

You could always eat. Now I will say that I didn’t always like the food, but there was always plenty of it. Our mess cooks had a high number of Philipinos, and that caused us to eat a lot of adobo and other foods from that nation. I didn’t like that. I tried not to eat on the forward mess decks because I didn’t want to eat a lot of junk, but sometimes I did because the lines to eat aft were long, especially when the food being served aft was good.

On the nights when there was steak, pizza, spaghetti, lobster, or other popular meals, a person could wait in line for an hour or more to eat. My duties didn’t permit me that kind of time, so I would eat a slider from forward. We would get steak and/or lobster about once per month when deployed.

The food was repetitive sometimes, because the mess cooks would screw up and order too much of something. They would get creative in naming it, in an attempt to make us forget we were eating the same meal every day for a week. First it was steamship round, then Yankee pot roast, Savory Roast beef, Prime rib, beef stew, pepper steak, etc,. We once ate chicken at every meal for 14 days straight. Even for breakfast.

Once we were at sea for 45 days or longer, each Friday we would have pizza and pasta night. During that meal, each sailor who wanted it could have two non-alcoholic beers. The enlisted got O’Douls, the chiefs and officers got Sharp’s.

I was once assigned to a working party that was onloading food at the pier in Norfolk. It sucked, because we were carrying food onboard while it was snowing. Four of us ducked into an electrical load center with a box of donuts and hid in there, snacking. The issue is that we had to get rid of the evidence or we would have been caught. So we ate the entire box. There are 144 donuts in a box. The donuts were lemon filled. Eating 3 dozen donuts made me sick. I couldn’t stand the taste of lemon filling for years after that.

Did we bitch about it? Of course we did. Our command Master Chief (the senior enlisted man onboard) used to say “A bitching sailor is a happy sailor. When they stop complaining and the crew goes silent, that’s when trouble is brewing.” The difference is that today, the sailors have social media and combined with the press looking for any reason to slam the military (and by extension, Trump) the complaints are getting traction in the press.

What should the CO do? Cut off all access to social media for the entire crew. Then have the crew scrub and paint the entire ship until it sparkles, now that they have so much free time. That way, they can’t post videos of mold in the showers or dirty berthing areas because they will be clean.

When I was an E-3, I spent a lot of time needle gunning, painting, buffing and polishing floors, and scrubbing the gadoogin deck edges. In fact, about a third of your workday is spent cleaning things when you are E-3 and below. That’s the real motivation to be promoted- you aren’t a janitor any longer.

By Divemedic, ago

Reporting

Aren’t reporters supposed to be impartial people reporting the facts? Then why is this reporter arguing with Sheriff Grady Judd?

By Divemedic, ago

Whiny Commie Kids

These kids today are bitching because they claim we of the older generations had it easy. They claim since rent is $2800/month, things are harder now than they were.

When I first got out of the military I moved to Arkansas. My entire family wound up living in the storeroom of the business I was trying to start. My kids were bathing in a 4 quart ice chest. It sucked. The only job I could find was working for a plant that made aluminum BBQ bits. Not as a maintenance worker or as an electrician, but filing the burrs off of metal castings for $5 per hour.

I decided we couldn’t make a living there, so we moved to Florida. When I got here, the only job I could get was as an electrician for $7.25 an hour. I was working for a company called Palmer electric, and two of us would be tasked with wiring a house (rough in) each day. That’s a lot of work for two people. The company charged the contractor $400 for the job. There was no real profit to be made. That’s why they started using illegals- the companies who were doing that could charge even less and still make money. This was 30+ years ago.

I was making $1000 per month and using that to support a family of four. The rent on our two bedroom apartment was $550 a month. That left us $450 per month for food, utilities, clothes, all of the other expenses. WalMart sold hotdogs $1 per pack, and Mac&Cheese $4 for 4 boxes. Slice 2 hot dogs up and mix with the pasta, and you have 4 dinners for $5. WalMart sold blue jeans for $8. I washed them in Borax to get the oil stains out. That’s how we made the money last.

I managed to get a job as an electrician at the airport, repairing boarding bridges, conveyor belts, and car washes. The pay was better- I was getting $9 an hour. We still struggled, so I got a second job as a part time firefighter.

This extreme poverty was what led me to asking my wife to get a job while the kids were in school. I just couldn’t take being poor and working two jobs while she sat home all day and the kids were in school. She refused, telling me that she married me so she wouldn’t have to work, and we wound up separating. Less than three months after that, I was homeless.

That’s not struggling, according to them. This generation thinks that no one else can possibly know what it’s like to struggle, as they complain about high rent. I can find a dozen apartments for less than $2k. Looking in my old neighborhood, I see a 2BR going for $1600. When you take into account the difference in pay from then, and housing is about the same cost as it was 30 years ago.

The poverty level for a family of 4 was $15,600 per year when all of that happened. I made $15,100 that year with a wife and two kids. The poverty level today for a single person is $15,300 per year and $32,150 for a family of 4. The difference is that Florida’s minimum wage is now $31,200. In other words, it’s EXACTLY the same as it was then. Nothing ever changes.

These people bitch over and over again about how they are poor. Then people who used to be poor come forward and give them perfectly reasonable advice on how to change. Instead of accepting that, they say “things are totally different now, you had it easy” then go back to bitching about how they are poor and it’s all Elon and “capitalism” that has caused it.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda

Propublica is a leftist rag spending a lot of it’s binary ink bitching about guns. The issue I have is in how they deliberately frame and distort facts in order to advance their agenda. Case in point is this headline:

This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then A Chicago Cop Was Killed With One Of Its Guns

So how did the gun wind up in the hands of a criminal? Olivia Burgos bought the 10mm Glock handgun from Range USA, in Merrillville, Indiana, on May 27, 2024, by lying on an ATF form about why she bought the gun, where she lived, and about her addiction to illegal drugs. She admitted to buying the gun for her boyfriend, who gave her the money for the gun and was a convicted felon who was not allowed to buy or possess firearms. It’s unknown how the gun made it from the boyfriend to the cop murdering criminal.

The story spins this into an indictment of the gun store itself, claiming that this one gun store had been cited for “serious compliance failures on multiple occasions” by the ATF. One thing that’s important to remember is the chain of stores in question have 50 locations in 14 different states. In other words, this isn’t a gun store, it’s 50 gun stores. There is no mention of just how many citations were issued, nor the severity of most of those issues. The ones that were mentioned are:

  • The Merrillville store faced revocation of its license following a 2022 inspection that determined a background check was missing for one sale. The ATF later rescinded the citation after the store provided proof that the background check had actually been conducted. In other words, not a violation.
  • In 2021 at the store in Dayton, the ATF determined an employee sold a firearm to a person who failed a background check, records show. Company representatives admitted to the agency that the employee had failed to follow store policy and “missed the appropriate connections” concerning illegal sales, despite training.
  • The next year in Lewis Center, an ATF inspector found that a sales clerk had falsified records of a gun sale after accepting an expired conceal-and-carry permit in lieu of conducting a background check

The cop killed that supposedly spawned this article? Yeah, the gun used in the April 26, 2026 murder was in fact sold by Range, USA. In 2024.

Authorities said Bartholomew and another officer transported robbery suspect Alphanso Talley to the hospital April 25 after he claimed to have swallowed narcotics. Prosecutors said Talley pulled a hidden handgun from beneath a blanket while preparing for a CT scan and opened fire on the officers before briefly escaping custody.

So how can you lay this at the feet of the gun store? How is a gun store to know that the woman buying a gun is not going to give it to her drug dealing boyfriend who will soon sell the gun on the black market before two years later, it eventually winds up in the hands of a murderer that kills a cop?

Everyone knows there is no way for the gun store to know this. That isn’t the point. This is being used as some sort of ‘gotya’ to a large firearms retailer. This retailer has 50 store locations- actually, they are each required to have their own FFL, so we are really talking about 50 separate gun stores. What is that? 100,000 guns per year in those 50 stores?

The insinuation of this article is that Range USA is somehow deliberately selling guns to criminals. They don’t come right out and say that, because it isn’t true and they would likely get sued for it. So instead they frame the facts in such a way as to encourage the reader to make that connection themselves. It’s one of the three ways to tell a lie, according to Robert Heinlein:

  • lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that
  • The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth — but not all of it.
  • The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.

In leaving out the important details, they are misrepresenting the facts, and this is a form of lying. If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.

By Divemedic, ago

That’s Some Soviet Shit

Remember when the left got their panties in a bunch when Florida prohibited teaching about gay sex? Papers were written, and the left’s chorus were all claiming it was a First Amendment violation. (pdf warning- not hosted here)

Proving once again that, if it weren’t for double standards, the left would have no standards at all, Virginia has passed a law that defies belief. It is now a crime in Virginia for a school to “state, suggest, or present as credible a statement or suggestion that there was extensive election fraud that could have changed or actually changed the results of the 2020 presidential election.” 

Not only that, but the same law says that school instruction must “Describe the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol as an unprecedented, violent attack on United States democratic institutions, infrastructure, and representatives for the purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Not only is this law egregious, but CBS’ reporting of it is as bad. The reporting here would have made Goebbels or Zhdanov proud. First lie is in the headline:

Virginia passes legislation prohibiting schools from teaching falsehoods about Jan. 6 riot

Read the money quote:

The White House posted a series of lies about Jan. 6 on an official federal government web page on Jan. 6, 2026, including a bogus claim that police bore responsibility for the attack.

So is telling teachers to teach only one side of a story propaganda, or not? A First Amendment issue, or not? Wouldn’t it be better in a politically charged case like this one, to present both sides and let students decide for themselves? Are we teaching students how to think, or what to think?

  • “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
  • “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
  • “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.”

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda

As I read this article, a supposed interview of the Minneapolis police chief, a couple of thoughts came to mind:

1 This is not an interview, it’s a propaganda piece

At one point in the interview, a supposed person driving by recognized the police chief and yelled out: “How dare you let this happen here? You should be fucking ashamed. You should be fucking sick. Fucking pig.” Yeah. That moment, some random passer-by, just happened to pass by when the chief was being interviewed on camera. I believe that. This entire piece is propaganda worthy of the old Soviet Union.

2 What we are seeing in real time, is an insurrection. There is nothing else to call it. This is a state, multiple states, in fact, that are openly defying Federal authority. The governor has said he is calling out the national guard to support local law enforcement. Support them in doing what? Defying or even attempting to arrest ICE agents, in my opinion. This is a thinly veiled threat.

The left is going to take over the government. Not by force. The useful idiots are going to help them. At the next election or two, the left will gain enough power to begin the purge. It’s coming. I’ve been saying it since the Floyd riots in 2020. Shit is going to get ugly. It’s taking longer than I thought, but this is perhaps being moderated a bit by the average American’s attention span.

By Divemedic, ago

Poverty Calculation

We always hear about poverty, but just how does the government decide what poverty is? In the 1960’s, a formula was created to define poverty. It was assumed at the time that food comprised one-third of a family’s budget, so any family that earned less than three times the amount of money that it took to buy food for the household was assumed to be poor.

Every year, the government calculates what they think it should cost to feed a family, then multiplies that number by three to arrive at a figure for the poverty line. How do they calculate that? How do they know what it costs to feed a family? Easy. They look at what it cost a family in 1963 to sustain itself, then adjust that number for inflation. Nowadays, there are idiots claiming that this number isn’t accurate- and I will grant you it isn’t- but they are using that to claim the new poverty number is 16, that is, a family needs to make 16 times what it costs for food in order to not be poor: $140,000 per year for a family of four. If you are poor, you should get government assistance. By this math, 60% of our nation would be living in squalor.

That’s ridiculous.

Where is that number coming from? The leftists claim that this is because the cost of childcare, Internet, and cell phones. First off, if you can afford cell phones and Internet, you aren’t poor. There are people all over the world who manage to exist without those things. Social safety nets are there to make sure people don’t starve. They aren’t there to buy Pizza Hut, video games, and cell phone porn.

The left is invested in making this economy look bad. They want Americans unhappy with the economy. There is an election next year, and Americans vote with their wallets. The press needs to hammer this home every day: “The economy sucks, but Joe Biden’s 9% inflation was the best economy in the past 50 years. Vote for us.”

Instead, let’s use the World Bank’s definition: Making less than $3.00 per person, per day. Under that definition, a family of four would be living in poverty if they had a household income of less than $4,400 per year. I will even be generous- we live in the richest nation in the world, so make that $10 per person, per day. A family of four who makes less than $14,600 is below the poverty line.

Would it suck to make that little? Sure it would. Being poor sucks. However, $10 per person, per day would make you more wealthy than 61% of the planet. That’s why we can’t afford to keep importing more and more poor people- they aren’t enriching us, they are dragging us down into poverty with them.

By Divemedic, ago