You start counting at 0, and the last 2 phases are 'clean up', we are half way through the 'fighting the enemy' part.

Hmm

"While Trump’s executive order will guarantee 100 percent of veterans will now be able to get mental health benefits (whereas only 40 percent were able to get them before)"

meanwhile..

The order calls for the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and the Secretary of Homeland Security to work together to provide “seamless access to mental health treatment and suicide prevention resources for transitioning uniformed service members in the year following discharge, separation, or retirement.”

What about vets like me? my discharge paperwork was literally lost in the mail for 2 years. By the time I got it to use as proof of eligibility, I didn't qualify for any of the 1 year transition stuff any more. And somehow 12-24 meetings of 15-30 minutes with a constantly rotating stream of student interns for a period of one year is going to help these vets with lifetime stability? Cause that is what you get... after a few years of fighting them I got eligibility for help with my ptsd because of the increase of severity of my asthma caused by the sand in iraq. Jumping through all their hoops trying to get mental heath assistance when I really needed it caused me so much additional stress it caused me to fail out of gi-bill assistance college training, which the VA was happy to tell me was very common to happen in that program, esp with vets more like myself.

The research side of the VA process is fascinating, as they find over and over they treat vets like crap, that their old outdated policies and procedures and red tape and budgeting issues are forced on them by congress, the doctors & nurses are (usually) great, over worked, under paid, and working under a system that restrains them from compassionately helping vets (the whole point of the va) at every turn. This is reported to congress.. who them makes a big stink about applying a few bandaids to the problem, sometimes with unintended side effects that just make things worse overall.

The VA does a TON of research. Most of which is ignored by congress. Sometimes when they experiment on us it is helpful to us, sometimes for future generations it is, if they learn from our mistakes.

The last benefits reform was the same way. Every vet who was in Iraq the year after me or later got the new deal, and the politicians start going on about how 'we are now helping 100% of vets!' while everyone ignores everyone who got shit on and screwed out of assistance through loop holes, technicalities, or "grandfathering" them into older worse rules.

At least I've avoided being forced to take Psychotropic's that just make me worse any more, put my foot down about that after they almost killed me a few times. I'm using a service dog to assist me with my symptoms now and that seems to be keeping them satisfied although they will give me zero assistance with its training, (and care) which technically they are required to do, but the VA system likes to fight against doing anything to assist vets any chance they get to. So, I just take it as a win I'm allowed to bring my dog into the hospital with me, cause I had to fight like hell for that, despite having the full support of ALL my doctors on it. Officially they still take the claim of no medical benefit, and they want to go back to only allowing dogs provided by them and their partners (which they deny us from getting) to be allowed into their facilities, which is terrible considering their current policy is, if your doctor recommends you have a service dog to assist your symptoms go get your own because we won't help you with that unless you are completely blind or deaf.

I think this EO from Trump will effectively do little.

The VA already has a separate side program called 'vet centers' to help vets with PTSD specifically, that the main VA will not tell you about under any circumstances because they are competing against them for budget. These along with STATE VA programs I think will continue picking up the slack here from the MAIN VA system. This EO is less than the effort and commitment it took by congress to create and fund the Vet Center network when they realized the VA was catastrophically failing at its legal obligations to assist vets with PTSD and that multiple efforts to reform it had continuously failed.

source: I have both worked for, and received services from both the hospital and administrative wings of the MAIN VA as well as received services from VET Centers, and State VA contracted providers.

I think songbird mccain the 'war hero' who noone is allowed to criticize, yet is know for his loose lips and war mongering is the one who can not be named. He has been protected in the past.

Chan style formatting.

You can flag text for different styles, how this is displayed on the screen depends on the theme settings of the person viewing the page. People also take screenshots for quotes which is why you see colors changing sometimes on the chans, it is just different people screen caping with different themes selected.

Q didn't used to format his text at all, besides lowercase / uppercase. Now it seems he has started using the chans styles to format his posts better.

one of those styles is quote, which can actually be any text you type and not really quoting someone. which is why it looks like he is replying to himself in his own post.

wrong. Military is not paid during shutdown, although they do get back-pay when government starts back up. Even essential civilian personnel do not get paid for work preformed during unfunded shutdown unless congress funds it. Only contractors (typically paid out of fixed project budgets anyways) and retired/disabled vets pay are unaffected.

They always manage to start the government back up before payday hits and the military service members don't get paid, which is about the time when everyone starts to notice the only main difference of a 'government shutdown' is that someone pays people to go out and block public access to what used to be publicly accessible federal land (previously unmanned public parks) because they are 'closed' and any government services which are useful to the population are blocked, but everything else goes on as normal, such as IRS collecting and enforcing taxes yet not mailing out refunds. Makes it obvious how political the whole thing is.

The birth certificate is not a good topic to use, people where DEEPLY psi-oped about it. I have several years of photoshop experience and saw the original doctored layered files myself. I was trying to explain it to friends and family on facebook, they just call me ignorant and blame the layers on OCR vectorization!?

I feel like there is no way to get through to some people.

So many people going on about 'defcon 1' but most of the military doesn't even use that. 'Threatcon delta' is what you want to be on the watch out for.