From One Federal Employee to Another

Just a little reading for everyone. This law was a big deal because it effectively cut off shipments of cigarettes and dip to service members. Which may seem like a good idea but tell any Mo-reen about the hazard to health a cigarette presents and I'm sure it's low on the totem-pole. Well it just got a little personal after I ordered some cigars from famous-smoke.com and they sent me a letter telling me that my FPO shipping address was a restricted shipping address. Well if you read the above statement from the USPS it clearly states that the shipment of Cigars is not restricted. You'd think that a website whose only way to get product to customers is shipping would know the law a little bit better. So this is now a headache.



For those not in the loop, the ban on shipping is really to staunch the flow of cheap nontaxable goods. Money is the root of this problem because states have different tax rates on tobacco products. Even after some changes, it's caused quite an uproar all over the federal government and even some states.The trend of online shipping is either to tax the goods under whatever state tax codes the goods are being shipped under or tax under the tax rates of the recipient's shipping address. Enforcing the latter for the general public and the former for deployed service members would let online companies cover the taxation of sales.

You might as well just start doing this, it's gonna be cheaper...

I can't agree with the outrageous near 8th Amendment violating price strangulation of tobacco that's been happening over the last 20 something years. It's like a whipping horse for federal funds, but also it's acceptable by the general public by putting pressure on whats widely viewed as a nasty habit. So smokers will always have to pay, I just hope after it costs 20$ a pack that they don't turn the all seeing eye toward my cigars.



In other news, Pakistan continues to rally together and rebuild after a devistating flood conduct business as normal.

No one is picking up a chick here.

MC2 Tucker M. Yates / Navy

This is a repost of a comment I left on the NavyTimes Scoopdeck Blog article about the shift in Navy Culture:
This is something that always really bothered me. For my first few years in I was stuck living on the ship which was a real drag at the time. It did force me to involve myself with all those in my shop and socialize much more with people on the ship who I normally wouldn't have spent much off time with. I was up in Bremerton, one of the few bases with an actual bar on it. We ended up many times going out and getting a bite to eat and hanging out there when there just wasn't anything else to. Sure there was a "liberty center" but to be honest if you were in Deck and it was known you hung out there, everyone had the gumption to know you really didn't have much of a life and we're seen as an outcast.

Then I got stationed in San Diego and that base is the poster-child for this article. The base club was regulated to lunch hours and was closed weekend nights. We also all lived in barracks and the camaraderie I was forming on my last ship never was fostered. It wasn't until deployment when people really started to come together and made those "shipmates for life" kind of friends.

All in all, the Navy is still tough enough to shun those who spend all their time in these "Liberty Centers". My skin would crawl everytime I walked over to the one on 32nd street to meet up with people. Getting caught in those places with your uniform is just telling the world "I have no life, and don't care".

Another angle is the rise in off base incidents. A lot of the junior sailors would run down to TJ to drink or end up in passed out on some gaslamp sidewalk. Having a base club for those living on base would give single sailors a place to unwind that the navy could monitor. Closing down on base watering holes allows Big Navy to wash their hands of the whole debate and punish sailors for screwing up out on town. CO's of ship do things like Beer on the Pier during deployments to let people unwind in a controlled environment and it works great every time. You'd think that that logic would follow to the home port, but I guess not.

NARMY

Well navytimes.com is now reporting that the missing service members are sailors. It doesn't really have any statements to back up that claim. I hope they are not right.

It sounds like the two were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It must be different on the ground, you can just take a vehicle in a war zone and just "head out" on your own. Sounds like special forces guys, something some meat head EOD guys would do. I've already known a few from base that have done stupid things like kill themselves on sports bikes and beat their wives. They let anyone that operate a light switch and swim do that stuff it seems. It's hard to criticize the community as a whole but most of the old timers were really elite and there were only a handful of Det's back in the day (pre 2000). So they could pick and choose. Same thing with the MA rate, good lord don't get me started on those egotistical bastards. You had to earn that shit before 9/11, now they just spray you with some mace, hand you a gun and a baton and give you a early 2000 model ford explorer.

All in all, I hope the Times got it wrong because no squid deserves to be dragged out of his vehicle, beaten and kidnapped when he's covering some Army guy's job filling an IA billet.