My two cents on the discharge of Sgt Stein

Here's how it goes, every time an enlisted man takes the oath of enlistment, part of it says, "and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me". It's pretty black and white, something that goes before everything else you do in the military, before they shave you bald and everything else is built around it. If you don't like it, get out after your enlistment is up or get kicked out.  The only way you can change oath is to pass a law to change that which you can not do while serving.  Being the center of a political movement while serving on active duty is just foolish, no matter which side of the political divide you are on and this gentleman had been warned multiple times.  We are all just gears in a machine who can be replaced and the slightest change in the wind and that's how the system was designed.

Being in the military, we have the illusion of freedom of speech and there men in hats who troll the nets looking for people who work for the government who step beyond outside the bounds of that invisible fence, probably the same people who track terrorists, cyber criminals, haters and that lot, nice people you get grouped with.  Stein crossed the that line, probably didn't think much about it at the time but it's the line drawn at the core of our oath of the military of a country that elects a civilian leader to call the shots instead of a military government.  Most of the people who complain his discharge over this issue are people who haven't served or military people who have only taken that oath once, for the people who have taken it more then a few times and can still hear it ring in their heads, we look at it a bit differently.

Good luck with your life Sgt Stein, I appreciate you standing by you guns and I'm sorry I didn't pull you aside and tell you, "dude, if you post that, the brass is going to hammer you".  Which I have been known to do to my blogger buddies when I see someone stepping over that line.  But I can't follow everything that goes on with the military in cyber space, I do have a life.

My wife calls me a "Disaster Whore"

Anytime something bad happens in the world, I'm all over it.  I'm like the kid from the movie Final Destination, I start throwing out numbers.  Tonight is twister night on the news and I have friend in Kansas and I'm hoping they are all alright.  I think something is wrong with my inner workings, I get excited by "Acts of God".  A couple of days ago, it was earthquakes, I have an earthquake app on my Samsung Epic and when the 8.6 earthquake hit in Indonesia, my phone vibrates, there's a Google map of the world with a circle showing how far away it was felt and the circle went halfway across Australia and Afghanistan.  That's huge.  Then the earthquakes in Mexico the next day.  I can't peel my eyes away.

Anyhow, if you're in the path of the tornado's in the plains, take cover and I'm looking forward to your stories on the other side.