I don’t wish I was an ostrich.

Not that they’re not beautiful birds.  Actually they’re not.  They’re rather ugly.  But that’s irrelevant.  More importantly, I like being able to see.  We all like being able to see.  Literally and figuratively, the whole world likes being able to see.  All the time.  So why are our heads buried in the sand?  Deep in the sand where we can’t hear or see.  We want to believe in peace and love.  And if we believe in peace and love, everyone ought to believe in peace and love.  So should I unconditionally believe in peace and love?  That sounds nice and romantic.  What if someone’s trying to kill me?  What if they just want to obstruct my right to worship or protest?  Or my use of language?

Surprise, these things are happening.  Every day, we give in to believing in nonsense and we lose.  We lose to Muslims.  No, I’m not adding ten different qualifiers to “Muslims” because I mean most Muslims.  I’m characterizing the majority.  I mean that most Muslims are either committing acts of  terrorism, supporting terrorists openly, tacitly condoning terrorism by harboring them, or spinelessly burying their heads in the sand and saying they don’t know anything about anything.  The end result is the same: a religion openly spiteful and actively engaged in killing Christians and Western nations is allowed to proliferate and gain traction in every facet of our society.  Wake up, everyone; this is Hitler marching.  This is World War III.  They’re out-breeding us 4:1, they hate us and they figured out how to beat us.  We elect our politicians democratically and since politicians want to stay employed, they vote for their constituencies.  So now European countries are outlawing the flying of their own national ensigns because Muslims are offended by the flag.  How can a flag subjugate their religion when the same flag guarantees their right to worship?  Don’t bother answering that question because you don’t need to understand it once there’s no hope in repealing it.  They’ll soon have the majority of the voting populace so if you live there, you will either supplicate your values or move.  But you’re running out of places to move.  We just elected the most socialist president this country’s ever seen.  As our situation grows more and more dire, people become more afraid and bury their heads even further in the sand.  Now all the people with their heads in the sand (or in Hollywood, your choice) can establish a community where they can feed eachother more mindless drivel about peace and love.  I guess as long as we can talk about peace and love we can plead innocence and ignorance while our country is overrun by well-funded and well-educated Muslims.  I’m a woman so I’ll be prepared to be enslaved and beaten.  That won’t be so bad because we all believe in peace and love.

Never forget 9-11.  Let’s not concede our country to the very people who attacked us.  Demand accountability.  Our military is bravely taking the fight to our enemy in the Middle East.  Do them the honor of not conceding the fight on the domestic front while they’re not here to protect us.  They’re protecting all our rights, including ambivalence.  Withdraw your head from the sand; you won’t recognize it the way your left it.

 

 

Read America Alone by Mark Steyn.  I will not recount the many well-researched points he makes and I’ll never forget them.  He will open your eyes.

The Power of Music

My soul was uplifted this morning by listening to classic violin masterpieces by the master violinists of our time.  Sarah Chang playing Vitali Chaccone, Zigeunerweisen, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.  Gil Shaham playing Carmen Fantasy, Mendelssohn.  I laughed out loud, cried and jumped in my seat.  I played violin for about 10 years but stopped when I went to the Naval Academy (except for a couple weddings and gigs) and to this day, nothing can stop me in my tracks like a solo violinist.  I am truly in love with the instrument and am mesmerized by the talented people who play it.  It hurts me that I can’t play the way I used to.  My mom forced me to practice for hours every day and I fought her so much as a kid but I am SO GRATEFUL now that she did and my daughter has another thing coming if she thinks she won’t be playing an instrument.

Unfocused musing

I have been far too unfocused lately.  My division is responsible in large part for keeping the ship electrically safe.  This job manifests itself in literally hundreds of requirements that don’t even touch the objective of keeping equipment up and running.  So, needless to say, the to-do list is enormous and growing.  Every inspection I do uncovers a minimum of 25 more discrepancies that are safety violations and must be fixed.  It is manageable and we can do this, but the requirements for our upcoming inspection are nebulous and I have never done this before.  I am anxious but eager to pass our inspection.  My chief is wonderful and my division is extremely hard-working and talented.  I truly believe that I will never find another group of employees in or out of the Navy that can compare to the division I have been blessed to lead on BUNKER HILL.  While I plan this workload, new critical equipment will break and we have to drop everything to fix it.  This happened twice this week.  When we have to fix something in order to get underway, how do I re-prioritize my previously high-priority items as suddenly unimportant?  The Navy’s antiquated solution is always to keep the division working for all hours of the night until the worklist is done.  This is impractical and any rational leader will acknowledge that.  Nonetheless, it is always the solution offered from people who aren’t being asked to work for 15 hours.  So I have stopped asking for suggestions and that has worked very well.  My division is so productive that I am not questioned for the most part unless someone wants to flaunt their rank (a daily occurrence) but that is a fleeting indulgence on their part so I acknowledge it like a fly buzzing around my head– a nuisance but ultimately harmless.

I take great pleasure in correcting problems, no matter how small.  This is coming together in my professional life while it disintegrates in my personal life.  I feel incomplete because I don’t keep my apartment clean enough, have started 5 books and finished none so far, I don’t cook enough anymore and I don’t run regularly anymore.  I have determined to revamp my lifestyle and pay as much attention to my personal priorities as I pay to my division.  I hereby commit to working out 5 days per week and cooking 3 days per week.  That leaves some evenings available for sushi, duty, not being hungry and a snack dinner.  That’s enough to start… I’m exhausted from the introspection!  It’s not good to go down this path for too long…

I’ll conclude my unfocused ramble for the evening.  I’m not sure what prompted the beginning, middle or end, but I do know that I’m going for a run!

Evangelist Christians… and how they embody evil

I just finished watching a documentary on evangelical Christians.  It documents “Jesus Camp”, a camp attended by children and adults to indoctrinate them (their words, not mine) into their radical faith (also their words, not mine) and teach them to be faithful by their standards.  They are taught to think of nothing but God and Jesus.  Children were weeping because they didn’t feel God around them and thought the reason was they weren’t trying hard enough or weren’t good enough for him to talk to them.  So naturally, I figure if one child was expressing this, most felt it and decided to fake it to make their parents happy.  75% of evangelicals homeschool their children because they don’t like the public school system for separating religion from the classroom and not teaching creationism as fact.  Evolution isn’t even taught as fact!  It is still taught as a theory (and rightfully so)!  The preacher stood in front of the children and told them Harry Potter was evil because he was a warlock and he would have been killed in traditional Christian cultures.  She spoke in tongues every time she prayed.  All the children cried with their hands in the air and spoke in tongues.  Some would fall over as they Holy Spirit washed over them.  These poor children are just trying to please their parents by being part of the experience when the truth is that all of the nonsense they were doing were to buttress their faith.  If you are truly faithful, you don’t need any of that to be steadfast in your belief!  You just BELIEVE.  Or you don’t.  But you don’t need to justify yourself by getting pliable children around you to speak in tongues.

It didn’t take long for the political angle of the camp to rear it’s ugly head.  By the third day or so, they had a man show up and show model fetuses and talk about all of the children that could have been in the room with them today had they not been aborted.  Absolutely morbid and simplistic.  He didn’t have to craft an argument that takes into account legitimate counterpoints because he was speaking to an audience that wanted nothing but to believe him and have him approve of them.  That’s what children want!  They want to be loved and they seek approval!  They haven’t become discerning yet so these evangelists have discovered a new market.  They had one memorable kid with a mullet preaching who was nothing short of generic.  They have no original thoughts or opinions.  They just credit God with everything and then share no sense of ownership for their own success.  It’s anti-Humanist and demeaning to all that is mankind to worship this way.  There is a way to be intelligent and religious.  These kinds of groups mar the reputation of smart, faithful people everywhere.

The documentary is called Jesus Camp.  I recommend it so you can see what people really do out there.

Who else learned about Adam Smith?

We had a lively discussion in the wardroom yesterday about a viable solution to the rising cost of water.  Two of us made the argument that in a situation with a limited resource, the best way to find an equilibrium that satisfies supply and demand is to allow prices to reflect demand, where demand is a function of an individual’s or household’s value placed on water.  Logically, as prices go up, demand decreases exponentially.  Since we’ve already defined demand as a function of the household’s perceived value of water, the decrease in demand dually reflects a decreased value placed on water and the consequential decreased usage.  When consumers determine that the cost of water is prohibitively high, they will buy less which, in turn, lowers profits for utilities companies.  If one company’s prices are too high, another company only needs to lower their prices by a “smidge”  and they will corner the market of consumers who cannot afford as much water as they require at the higher price.  They will be able to buy more of the same product at a lower price with the new company.  The first higher-priced company will have to lower their prices to compete with the new company.  And so the two companies enter into a price war that inevitably results in the lowest possible price for the companies to stay in business, and vastly more satisfied customers with their lower water bills.

Say we start to run out of water (which CA does periodically).  Now that the supply of water is lower, it becomes more expensive to counter the increased demand for this limited resource.  The only change now will be a new minimum price for the companies to stay in business, factoring in the lower supply.  But there’s more.  Let’s establish a third company who recognizes the draught and has invested a lot of capital into inventing a cheaper, more efficient procedure for reverse osmosis that will solve the problem of decreased supply.  While this company’s initial capital investment has been expensive, their production costs for sustaining the business are significantly lower thanks to this new technology.  They will be able to charge less than all the other utilities companies and undercut the market until the other companies develop the new technology and compete.  The consumer doesn’t care about any of this though.  Their bottom line: lower prices, more water.

This cycle works!  This is CAPITALISM.  Government intervention artificially lowers water prices for the poor consumer who would suffer at the hands of the utilities companies otherwise.  How about the poor consumer who, in the long run, will not have utilities companies that have ever had the burden of competition and innovation forcing them to develop long-term solutions to California’s water problem.  They will suffer more government intervention in the way of penalties as an external motivator for training the consumer to decrease usage of water.  So the end state of government intervention in the water industry is artificially low prices that do not reflect the supply or demand for water, lower quantities, higher prices and imposed penalties.  It’s clear that it’s the dirty money-grubbing capitalists that are ruining the country.  Thank God we have our bleeding heart liberals helping us poor consumers with economic policy that we couldn’t have solved ourselves with a little innovation and competition.

Who’s looking out for you?

When I graduated from the Naval Academy, I bought myself a watch as a present for $180.  One year later and wiser, I took this watch to Prime Time in Horton Plaza because the battery died.  After $21 and a week, it became clear that the recent battery install would not fix my watch; the real problem was in the mechanism controlling the movement of the hands.  I walked up to Nordstrom armed with the watch, my memory and the assumption of a 2 year warranty.  I explained my story to the jewelry saleswoman, complete with the exact date of the purchase and at which Nordstrom.  She found no record of my purchase and I didn’t even have the same credit card with me for this conversation.  Despite everything, she took me at my word and changed out my watch with a brand new one from the case which, by the way, was still for sale and for $15 more.  I thanked her profusely and left entirely satisfied.

I called my parents to share the story with them and walked away with a renewed sense of faith in humanity.

Our country is going down a path that has been predicted by experts with an understanding of reality and consequences.  Despite the [increasingly accurate] predictions, this path has been described with rose-colored glasses by our ELECTED officials as a necessary road to help our fellow man or some other nonsense.  What worries me the most is the descriptor I emphasized: these officials are truly elected by my peers, a young liberal, college-educated generation that has never been forced to defend their opinions because they attended a school with a homogeneous population and the resulting lack of political dissent.  This lack of discussion cannot and will not pan out as expected.  Rather, we are passing more bills to raise taxes on our country’s most productive sectors which will naturally decrease this sectors ability to HIRE EMPLOYEES and the jobless rate will inexplicably rise.  Don’t worry, we’ll still have an empathetic elected legislative branch to blame past administrations.  As long as you have an excuse for failure, it’s ok to fail.

In the midst of these musings, last week’s encounter was particularly meaningful.  A saleswoman believed I wasn’t running a scam and helped me out.  Things aren’t as bad as they seem because the everyday working man and woman in this country is still pulling their weight, doing their part and making the world better each and every day.  Now that’s something to wake up for in the morning.

Hello World!

Well, I’m new to blogging, so I’ll treat this as a stream of consciousness style of writing and hopefully I don’t give you a headache! Some quick background on myself: My name is Maggie Schmidt. I graduated from the United States Naval Academy, Class of 2008. It was a wonderful experience and quite different from what I expected. I am now stationed in San Diego and want to record my thoughts and feelings about these early, formative years of my life. I run a division of seven on a ship and absolutely love going to work every day. There is always room for improvement, but I love waking up and working with sailors. Hopefully, in 20 years, I will look back on my time in the Navy fondly. My experience with leadership and running a division now will inform my performance as a leader later when I’m in charge of a whole company. I hope that this blog may serve as a useful tool to remind me of my roots.

I have a large variety of interests, but they seem to be streamlining themselves into either useful to me at work or not. If they are useful, I am able to practice and perfect them. If not, they are dropped to the wayside because there is little means or opportunity to practice outside of work. This is largely due to the lengthy work hours and pressure of earning a SWO (Surface Warfare Officer) pin. I haven’t decided if this is good or bad. So far the result has been an increased attention paid to studying for entering an MBA program in a few years and staying current on news and politics.

I’m reading a book right now called “Seducing the Boys Club”. It’s written by and is about a female advertising executive who started at the bottom and worked her way to the top of a traditionally (and persistently) male industry, including some of the tricks and tools she employed to do this successfully. I find it germane to the Navy and the industries I hope to enter once I transition to the civilian sector. The dynamic on my ship is perfectly comfortable in terms of men and women working together. We are accepted as officers and members of the wardroom like anyone else. We are held to the same standard as anyone else. This is a departure from the Naval Academy where there was some animosity towards women for a perceived lack of standards for women who broke rules or didn’t perform as well on physical tests. The Big Navy (as we called it back then) is past that. Most men run the PRT slower than I do so they don’t have any ground to stand on in complaining that my standard is lower than theirs. I meet THEIR standard to keep them from griping, but mostly as a point of pride for myself. Anyway, I digress. I find it easier to distinguish yourself in general as a minority in any homogenous environment. Women are the minority in this particular environment and, like it or not, there is a spotlight on every one of us. If a woman fails, the headline doesn’t just read that an officer failed. No, a FEMALE officer failed. And so it will be until a positive culture shift can be affected and that will require time. I’ve talked to plenty of sailors who were honest with me and told me they preferred ships (even my ship– it’s 22 years old) when there were no women on board. When asked for their reasons, they have been very honest with me. They want to be able to talk about whatever they want without being turned in. They don’t want the distraction of women around the workplace. They resent women who manipulate standards on the basis of their minority status (being held to a lower standard to maintain a quota, etc) and the infamous “getting pregnant to get out of deployment”. Like in any homogenous environment, the majority will rarely be challenged by eachother to prove their points because they all agree already! So I have quick and effective rebuttals for each of these points. First, my personal preference is to allow sailors and coworkers to talk however they want and not censor themselves because I’m a woman. Problem solved. Second, if they cannot work with women in their workplaces then that sounds like a personal problem and they probably shouldn’t advertise that. The women should not exacerbate the problem by wearing heavy perfume and excessive makeup (the Navy takes care of that possibility with uniform standards) but men should not advertise that they are not capable of working around women without thinking of sex to the extent that they cannot perform their duties. Grow up. Third, there are women AND men who slip through the cracks of established standards. Exactly like I said earlier, if a woman slips through the crack, we’re ALL failures. That will be fixed with time and exposure to more competent women. Finally, for women who would actually get pregnant SOLELY to get out of a deployment, good riddance. More likely, they are between the ages of 20 and 30 and they want a child! That’s a shocker! They should be congratulated and offered the support they need.

Well that concludes my blog (rants) of today. This did cover one of the subjects I’m most often asked about: “What’s it like being a woman in the military?” In a word: rewarding.

My stream of consciousness will take over again sometime soon and I will fill you in on regular happenings and progress at work. Thanks for reading! Please let me know of any comments or questions!

Shutting Detroit [and every other city] Down

I am a huge fan of the song Shutting Detroit Down by John Rich. It is a gut-wrenching, personalized look at the after-effects of the policies established in Washington. I’m no bleeding heart. I don’t look at this from the perspective of seeing someone who NEEDS a job or WANTS it should just get it or be allowed to keep it. I am of the school of thought that no economy can hope to stay productive when it stifles it’s most productive sectors. High corporate taxes reduce a companies resources and ability to expand and hire new employees. Taxation should not be based solely on a method for the government to create it’s own source revenue off it’s people. Taxation can spur an economy if done correctly. Ireland is a leading headquarter for large international corporations now because of their LOW corporate taxes. So what are the obvious results? Companies move to where they can most affordably do business. They bring their employees with them. Employees need places to sleep, eat and buy things. Ireland’s indigenous industries expand with the new influx of foreign residents. So Ireland has expanded their national industries while attracting new capital investments in the country (the U.S continues to maintain a large level of capital investment, but no one is going to talk about that in the news). International competition requires some specialization. For instance, Turkey isn’t competing with IBM in the micro-processor market. The world’s leading companies will gravitate to a stage upon which they can be most productive and that is ceasing to be in the U.S.! Now that should be alarming to Washington. How can we continue to call ourselves a powerhouse if we do not support our own domestic-grown international conglomerates. We should praise them for their contribution, innovation and unique ability to supply a product that MILLIONS of people need and can afford. No, it is fashionable to chastise them for an isolated incident of a CEO buying an expensive elevator all for himself. I ask, WHO CARES? Look what the rest of the company is doing! If that company and CEO waste their money that way, let capitalism solve that problem by another company who didn’t waste the money evolve a cheaper way to produce their product.

It depresses me to discuss this topic because of the stunning lack of understanding of reality by our own elected politicans. That stems from the voting populace: learn about your candidates! Elect someone who has a background in economics and business. In two years we can turn Congress around. It’s time to take a stand and not allow any more of this! Throw some tea in the water, read Atlas Shrugged, learn about economics and elect someone who knows some of the same things you do.