Ahh, the media. Most people don't know about the secretive Journalist's Guild. Oh, yes, it has it's own symbol, a quill pen on parchment. Members of the Guild have secret handshakes and the way they clink their drink glasses is very specific.
The Guild doesn't have temples like the Masons. The Guild meets in bars. There they discuss the public relations and propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays. The young journalists learn the steps of the Guild as they work their way up to Grand Master. Josef Goebbels was a Journalist Guild Grand Master in Nazi Germany.
If a journalist gets out of line or off message, he or she is excommunicated from the Guild. They are blackballed from all main stream media. This happened to Seymour Hersh and I suspect has also happened to our hero, Brian Wilson. Of course, Hersh and Wilson dare not break their oath of secrecy to the Guild.
Nowadays, members of the Guild are gathering in bars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C., wondering what went wrong. They are drinking heavily.
One of the things I'd mention about the security clearances is how much they are worth in the civilian world. If you look up how much more you make with one vs without, it's huge. And the higher your clearance, the more it's worth.
A security clearance is worth more than a college degree, when it comes to predicting overall income. That's true even at the lower level, starting wage for jobs with a clearance was $130,000 a year last time I looked.
Now imagine a corporation hiring someone with the highest clearance who still has access to insider information. How much would that be worth if you are producing drones or anything that could end with a government contract, big bucks right?
These guys with the highest clearances are raking in the big bucks because they are still using their access, if it was up to me all clearances would be revoked as soon as you leave the military. But, you can imagine why there is no incentive to make that happen. Everyone who has one knows that at a minimum it's a backup plan for higher paying employment.
In a way you can think of it as being bonded by Uncle Sam as well, getting bonded isn't cheap. Although there are so many people that have them now, thanks to the massively invasive homeland security, that they aren't worth as much as they once were. Although the same is true for college degrees, a trained monkey could get one today so half of them aren't worth what a high school diploma once was.
Brad, My brother was an electrical engineer at McDonnell Douglas/Boeing in St. Louis. He worked on the F-18 Hornet fighter/bomber. He had to get a security clearance from the Pentagon. He's never worked for the government.
My brother took my Dad and I on a tour of the F-18 factory in St. Louis. It is a very well run plant. Those F-18s are a lot bigger than you think when you see them in person.
That's cool, aside from what their mission is, they are amazing aircraft aren't they? We guarded a lot of airfields, so I got to dream about being up in fighters, but never any closer.
And yep lot's of our vendors/repair people on base needed to get clearances too, just depended on what they were involved with, if it was anything weapons related like our TOW missiles or anything related to "sensitive equipment", like our night vision they would need one for sure.
I'm not even sure why doing clearances was part of our job to be honest, I suppose it was to give us something to do when we were in garrison. In the field we were "scouts", the whole going behind enemy lines thing. getting the intel on where the enemy was and all that stuff. We would set up battalion headquarters then go out in front and come back to blackout tents and write the stuff down on grease-boards using codes for all the different equipment and formations of men that we saw, then we would brief the Brass so they could make the plans. We were S2, battalion level intel, Scouts. (In Panama we did none of those things and instead relied on Narks who gave us intel to go on night raids.)
In garrison they turned us into paper pushers because we had an office in headquarters building next to the Colonel I guess, busy work really. I had two years of computer experience in college before joining the infantry.
We had to be weapons experts, stealth experts, have mad land navigation skills and be computer literate, when most people wouldn't know how to turn one on. Odd combination for back then, but I fit the bill. In a war like Ukraine, which is kind of what we trained for, being that this was the end of the cold war, I'd probably have been dead in the first week, whichever side I was on. Sobering thought of the day.
Thanks, Brad for your interesting story in S2. That's the place to be if you are in the Army. You had dangerous missions, but at least they weren't boring. Your job in S2 kept your brain working and your body in shape. That's a good job.
My brother always wanted to fly in an F-18, but he never did. He did fly out to carriers in the passenger/parts/mail plane. That was a thrill. At least I was able to fly hundreds of times in the DeHavilland Beavers and Cessnas I worked on as an aircraft mechanic.
Ahh, the media. Most people don't know about the secretive Journalist's Guild. Oh, yes, it has it's own symbol, a quill pen on parchment. Members of the Guild have secret handshakes and the way they clink their drink glasses is very specific.
The Guild doesn't have temples like the Masons. The Guild meets in bars. There they discuss the public relations and propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays. The young journalists learn the steps of the Guild as they work their way up to Grand Master. Josef Goebbels was a Journalist Guild Grand Master in Nazi Germany.
If a journalist gets out of line or off message, he or she is excommunicated from the Guild. They are blackballed from all main stream media. This happened to Seymour Hersh and I suspect has also happened to our hero, Brian Wilson. Of course, Hersh and Wilson dare not break their oath of secrecy to the Guild.
Nowadays, members of the Guild are gathering in bars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C., wondering what went wrong. They are drinking heavily.
My lips are sealed...around the top of this bottle of Buffalo Trace...
One of the things I'd mention about the security clearances is how much they are worth in the civilian world. If you look up how much more you make with one vs without, it's huge. And the higher your clearance, the more it's worth.
A security clearance is worth more than a college degree, when it comes to predicting overall income. That's true even at the lower level, starting wage for jobs with a clearance was $130,000 a year last time I looked.
Now imagine a corporation hiring someone with the highest clearance who still has access to insider information. How much would that be worth if you are producing drones or anything that could end with a government contract, big bucks right?
These guys with the highest clearances are raking in the big bucks because they are still using their access, if it was up to me all clearances would be revoked as soon as you leave the military. But, you can imagine why there is no incentive to make that happen. Everyone who has one knows that at a minimum it's a backup plan for higher paying employment.
In a way you can think of it as being bonded by Uncle Sam as well, getting bonded isn't cheap. Although there are so many people that have them now, thanks to the massively invasive homeland security, that they aren't worth as much as they once were. Although the same is true for college degrees, a trained monkey could get one today so half of them aren't worth what a high school diploma once was.
Brad, My brother was an electrical engineer at McDonnell Douglas/Boeing in St. Louis. He worked on the F-18 Hornet fighter/bomber. He had to get a security clearance from the Pentagon. He's never worked for the government.
My brother took my Dad and I on a tour of the F-18 factory in St. Louis. It is a very well run plant. Those F-18s are a lot bigger than you think when you see them in person.
That's cool, aside from what their mission is, they are amazing aircraft aren't they? We guarded a lot of airfields, so I got to dream about being up in fighters, but never any closer.
And yep lot's of our vendors/repair people on base needed to get clearances too, just depended on what they were involved with, if it was anything weapons related like our TOW missiles or anything related to "sensitive equipment", like our night vision they would need one for sure.
I'm not even sure why doing clearances was part of our job to be honest, I suppose it was to give us something to do when we were in garrison. In the field we were "scouts", the whole going behind enemy lines thing. getting the intel on where the enemy was and all that stuff. We would set up battalion headquarters then go out in front and come back to blackout tents and write the stuff down on grease-boards using codes for all the different equipment and formations of men that we saw, then we would brief the Brass so they could make the plans. We were S2, battalion level intel, Scouts. (In Panama we did none of those things and instead relied on Narks who gave us intel to go on night raids.)
In garrison they turned us into paper pushers because we had an office in headquarters building next to the Colonel I guess, busy work really. I had two years of computer experience in college before joining the infantry.
We had to be weapons experts, stealth experts, have mad land navigation skills and be computer literate, when most people wouldn't know how to turn one on. Odd combination for back then, but I fit the bill. In a war like Ukraine, which is kind of what we trained for, being that this was the end of the cold war, I'd probably have been dead in the first week, whichever side I was on. Sobering thought of the day.
Thanks, Brad for your interesting story in S2. That's the place to be if you are in the Army. You had dangerous missions, but at least they weren't boring. Your job in S2 kept your brain working and your body in shape. That's a good job.
My brother always wanted to fly in an F-18, but he never did. He did fly out to carriers in the passenger/parts/mail plane. That was a thrill. At least I was able to fly hundreds of times in the DeHavilland Beavers and Cessnas I worked on as an aircraft mechanic.
Thanks again for your S2 story.