I don't understand why this process makes Joe Moser feel proud. Let's review the events:
1) He was shot down on a routine bombing run and subjected to the physical horrors of Buchenwald and the mental horror that 2 Frenchmen had been shot on his account.
2) Despite the "Fog of War", he was able to discover those Frenchmen weren't killed after all, long before the US government even found his lost paperwork.
And this is France we're talking about, where when bureaucrats are given the motivational book "Who Moved My Cheese" (oh my god, there's a video ... with music ... shoot me like a Collaborateur!) immediately take off the next month trying to get to the bottom of the unsolved mystery. Not exactly the model of efficient civil bureaucracy, those French.
3) He wasn't awarded the medal that was rightfully his, one he'd earned by risking his life, until he co-wrote a book and gained some small amount of fame.
So the lesson is that you can make all but the ultimate sacrifice for your country in her time of greatest need, but if you're not even mildly newsworthy, the hell if the government will bother with you. I feel prouder already. Hell yeah, let freedom ring!
UPDATE: It's not just him either, apparently 50 years is something of a standard timeframe for the military to deal with such recognition. So does this mean that we'll find out who orchestrated the JFK assassination in 2013? I sure hope so!
Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
01 February 2009
05 May 2008
why they hate us, part 1 trillion
Hmmm ... a trillion for wanton destruction, and a paltry 1 billion (promised aide feeds no mouths) for helping people eat.
What was that about hearts and minds? Apparently there is no space in the agenda for stomachs. I mean, how could anyone truthfully assert that we have our priorities anywhere but in exactly the right place? It's not like the haves try to instigate the have-nots. However, to be fair, people have actually done the acts depicted, and in the name of Islam. So why do people get so offended by the replaying of facts? These things happened. It is offensive to Muslims to blame all Islam because of the acts of a few, this is true, but this is also known as freedom of speech. We give you the freedom to worship whatever you like, a freedom which many Islamic countries do not have, and you cannot choose your freedoms piecemeal - they come as a set, take them all or leave them all.
What was that about hearts and minds? Apparently there is no space in the agenda for stomachs. I mean, how could anyone truthfully assert that we have our priorities anywhere but in exactly the right place? It's not like the haves try to instigate the have-nots. However, to be fair, people have actually done the acts depicted, and in the name of Islam. So why do people get so offended by the replaying of facts? These things happened. It is offensive to Muslims to blame all Islam because of the acts of a few, this is true, but this is also known as freedom of speech. We give you the freedom to worship whatever you like, a freedom which many Islamic countries do not have, and you cannot choose your freedoms piecemeal - they come as a set, take them all or leave them all.
27 August 2007
some people can do no right
I don't normally read Forbes because I think it's tripe, but this "welcome screen" (a.k.a., welcome to unwanted advertising interfering with your reading experience) really caught my eye:
On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.
To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.
So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.
So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).
On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.
To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.
So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.
So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).
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