Oh, so NOW you want Truth

by Kevin Candela

I’d say it’s about time, but it was about time fifteen years ago, when the media was spoon-feeding you terrifying lies and you weren’t questioning them because—hey—they’re on TV! Or the radio, worse yet, which was already poisoned with deception by then courtesy of paid propagandist water-muddiers like Rush Limpbaugh (sic) and the even more repellant parasite “Cape Girardeau Roses” that followed the Jabba the Hutt of lies.

Excuse the tone. It’s just rough being a couple of decades ahead of the game, knowing it well all that time and watching the audience slowly wake up to the fact that virtually nothing the news media have told them in the past few decades is true. Oh, okay, maybe it rained somewhere and they accurately reported THAT. Big deal.

Here’s the thing: NASA and the defense industry have a TON of workers. I worked in the defense industry for seventeen years. In addition to dealing with assembly problems (there were tons of those too) as a liaison engineer to the shop, my name is on design drawings for detail parts, layouts and assemblies for the Harrier’s control systems (specifically the nose landing gear steering box, but other stuff too). This is from the Mylar/vellum days, so yeah—I inked drawings. I was an aerospace engineer—thank you Jonny Quest and Lost in Space—and I had a Secret clearance…that is, until the Ames spy case made the whole industry drop all unnecessary Secret clearances to Confidential.

How much Secret did I see in all that time? NOTHING. How much Confidential? NOTHING. The Harrier was a Secret project full of conventional tech. The British already had them flying, albeit poorly and dangerously, and all we were doing was lightening up the structure and giving it a computer-driven sense of balance so the pilots didn’t risk death every time they moved forward out of hover mode.

Digressing here but to a point: I am NOT an outsider to the military industrial complex. No, I’m not what you’d exactly call an “insider of note” either, but I DO know how things work at a contractor, extremely well in fact because (like the 13th Warrior) “I listen”. And when I tell you, please consider this as a microcosm of the bigger picture that may help you grasp just what is happening in our “confusing” world.

The contractor puts dumb loudmouths in charge of shop areas. Not always, but if there’s a feeble employee screwing up everything they touch, my former employer would move that person into shop management and…get this, because it’s important…blame the union because the person could not simply be fired. Now here’s the trick—there’s a trial period of a couple of months during which time this person’s incompetence should be noted and the person dismissed then. But that’s not how it works.

Cronyism is how it works.

The so-called Buddy System is intrinsic to human nature. Unavoidable, perhaps. Either way, it’s the root cause of incompetent leadership. These future shop managers who managed to get through several months of work without getting fired are friends of existing shop managers. And by friends, I mean people that these other shop managers can secretly “own” and use to build their own power pyramids. Incompetence covers its own butt, in short. These people meet secretly, in bars if they’re truly scraping the bottom of the power pyramid world, and play little ownership games as they scheme how to keep the competent people they supervise unhappier than they are. And make no mistake, people in the buddy system of defense management are by and large sad little examples of humanity.

Now I hope the same can’t be said for NASA, but the thing is that the whole industry shares one big messy and overpriced bed. People work for Boeing, then go to NASA. People from NASA end up at Gulfstream, Lockheed, Kaman…there aren’t many left, but the rule among contract engineers is that you go where the work is.

Okay, so now you know the basics: The defense industry, which hinges on PRODUCTION, has a production system that is managed by thugs and cronies, and the whole thing is incredibly wasteful because these insecure bosses make it that way on purpose. Corruption rules whether the guys in the jackets and ties in the offices want to believe it or not. And even engineering has to take a back seat to SCHEDULE. That’s why the Challenger blew up. “But at least it went up on schedule” – the guy who okayed the launch despite the call-in from the engineer in charge of seal design. No, he may not have said that. But the guy should have gone to prison.

Now for the punchline. I don’t want to disappoint anyone who has managed to wade through this rant.

As below, so above.

When it comes right down to it, the military industrial complex is a lowbrow thug buddy system-operated mess that squanders most of our natural resources JUST TO KEEP THE PRODUCTION LINES GOING. They’re terrified, the workers there, that we might eventually wise up and they might have to learn a trade that doesn’t involve destroying the world in the name of (killing) defense. Hey, even I didn’t want to be laid off in 1991…I was making decent money. But I didn’t go into aerospace to kill people, I went into aerospace to be Major West. The guiding-the-Robinsons-through-space gigs weren’t available, but designing spring washers and levers for the Harrier was, and hey…the Harrier did the same stuff as Dr. Quest’s plane, and I was still naïve and believed in the American Way.

Got over that quick.

Now picture this scene: Mid-1990s, there’s all kinds of talk of getting rid of bases. Uh-oh. This can’t happen! Billions of dollars are threatening to LEAVE the MIC behind!

Big Lie time. You all know the date. Yeah, and that’s when the LIE shifted into high gear. “Oh boy, now we need MORE bases!” “Hey, the news is saying…”

Yep. That’s when you let it slip away. You want the Truth back now, it’s gonna hurt. A LOT. You are going to think the former you was a world-destroying news-addicted zombie. Because you were. And now, now that you know…what are you gonna do about it?

I never advocate violence. I advocate rationality. Start being rational. When people say “We have to have protection from ____ (Threatening nation of the week/day)!” and “Good thing we have a badass military!” and “Hey, did you hear that crazy foreign leader? We should blow up his cities!” they are revealing themselves to be worse than the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They are Dupes of Extraordinary Magnitude, and I’m sorry if you’re reading this and offended, because the intent is to wake you, not offend you.

I was a D.E.M. once too.