This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Society

  • The military must overhaul its education

    There’s been a sea change in attitude of the US military when it comes to the education of its ranks. Not so long ago post secondary education was considered the exclusive realm of the officer corps. Today, not only is the military leadership encouraging its enlisted men and women to seek out higher education, they’re actively spending billions of dollars as a matter of deliberate policy in order to achieve that goal. Unfortunately for everyone involved, including the taxpayer, this policy has been pursued in fits and starts with half measures and aimless, profligate spending.

    As it stands now the military spends almost $8 billion a year more than service members have put in for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. That’s billions of dollars engorging a hopelessly broken, corrupt and often anti-military academic system in order to attempt to educate troops who have already left the service, to very mixed results. To put that number in perspective, that’s about 50% more than the 42,000 student, globally ranked Top 20 University of Washington spends in the same time frame , including it’s $1 billion research budget. Or, it’s the collective endowment of the entire University of California’s eleven campuses serving a quarter of a million undergraduate and postgraduate students. This is, largely, a consequence of The GI Bill being a law structured to garner political support by feeding the beast and institutional military support by attracting recruits during the hard years of 2005-2008. What it should be is designed to educate service members for the purpose of empowering the force, improving retention and setting up them for success when they transition out of the armed forces.

    Not to mention, do you really want your tax funded GI Bill paying the tenured salary of the likes of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky?

    All that’s not to say that the military is only spending money on vets. In 2011 the military spent $542 million on tuition assistance for active duty troops and some of their dependents. TA grew so quickly and to such heights that Congress moved to slash it by 25%. With this deluge of largely unaccountable money, online and distance learning schools have popped up on bases around the world. On nearly every base you can find a learning center with several different, often for-profit, schools offering all manner of courses. The for-profit American Public University System, which runs the popular American Military University, alone has over 100,000 students. Unfortunately there’s little to no coordination between the military and the school’s faculty when it comes to the individual service member’s needs or academic progress. Consequently, these money gobbling schools are often difficult for young troops to complete and most have graduation rates well below 50%. As for the actual course work? It’s not pretty.

    This sad state of affairs is even more astounding when one considers that the US military has successfully been in the business of higher education for over 200 years and is, today, the largest educational apparatus in the country. The Department of Defense and it’s various bureaucratic affiliates are directly responsible for, or directly pay for, the post secondary education of more people than any other entity in the country. The Department of Education can’t even come close to providing the educational impact for adults the DoD does and it most likely never will. This doesn’t even touch the almost 9,000 staff in 200 DoD schools who are responsible for the K-12 education of almost 90,000 military dependents.

    Fortunately, within that depressing realization is also the answer to, not only fixing the military’s broken education promises but, reforming the entire way higher education works in the United States. (more…)

  • Murdered cop in Austin


    Austin, Texas is abuzz today about the murder of Austin Policeman Jaime Padron, father of two daughters, by Walmart shoplifter and drug user Brandon Montgomery Daniel who has been charged with capital murder for shooting Padron in a tussle in WalMart when Padron responded to private security guards’ calls to police. Of course, his mother is telling the media that Daniel is a good boy;

    [Mary O’Dell] said her son graduated with honors from Colorado State University and had been on the “fast track” at Hewlett-Packard. She described him as a bright young man who was published in three science journals while still in college.

    But about three months ago, he began wrestling with a deep depression after a difficult breakup with his longtime girlfriend, she said. Daniel had not been behaving like himself recently and was charged with driving while intoxicated, his mother said.

    Of course, you can always count on the Left in Austin to muddy the discussion with their illogical banter. For example, Debbie Russell, the sister of Cindy Sheehan, is disgusted by the coverage of the police officer’s death;

    Padron’s weapon was holstered, Daniel drew his and shot Padron, but apparently, it’s somehow police policy that’s at fault. And no one is paying attention to another murder that occurred this weekend in which a black man was killed.

    By the way, two Walmart private security were the ones who had to disarm and subdue Daniel after Officer Padron was murdered. I’m sure that sticks in the craw of people like Russell, too. Two guys not paid by taxes caught a criminal.

  • Washington Post: Gated communities breed fear

    Edward Blakely, who apparently thinks that guns, not people kill people, writes today in the Washington Post that gated communities killed Trayvon Martin;

    Though gates reroute traffic, they do not lower crime. Instead, in these controlled spaces, an “us vs. them” mentality festers: Leaders of gated communities need to show that there is value to their rules by creating an external enemy — those people outside the walls.

    Blakely contends that the presence of private security gives residents a false sense of security. No more than having an overbearing TSA at our airport gates, or those rehabbed criminals with guns guarding our Federal buildings in the nation’s capital gives everyone a false sense of security. Is anyone suggesting that we fire the tens of thousands of private security guards that we pay with our tax dollars? Or downgrade security presence at the airport because they’re only engaged in the harassment of travelers which does nothing to improve our security?

    The difference of course, is that these gated communities pay out of their pockets for to address their security concerns and the TSA is funded by taxpayer dollars. Blakely, in his last paragraph says this outloud;

    We have to work together to reduce crime, poverty and other social problems in our communities — rich and poor, black and white, urban and suburban. If we aren’t hanging out together where we live, we can easily fall apart.

    Yeah, well, we’ve been working together to reduce crime for a few thousand years, and it’s working so well that some people feel as if they have to do more. Looking to the future for a perfect crime free society is fine, but those of us who have families today want a more immediate solution.

    I wouldn’t live in a gated community because I don’t like people, any people, criminals or not. But if those people who do live in gated communities feel more secure, leave them alone. We all have to do what we feel is necessary to protect our families. And the way that the media is sticking pins in a George Zimmerman doll, can blame anyone for delegating their security concerns to someone else?

  • 2 dead, 14 wounded in Miami shootout

    Apparently, they take their funerals seriously in the Miami black community. A young fellow who died by jumping from the 4th floor to the 2d floor of a parking garage while he was attempting to escape from Paul Blarth, Mall Cop, was laid in state at a local funeral home, when a mourner touched him inappropriately. Some of his friends began brawling in the funeral parlor and spilled out into the street where some firearms made an appearance and began shooting people, according to CBS Miami;

    “It was horrific, people were going crazy, screaming, running, just chaos.”

    Pastor Lenoir was with the victim who died on the scene. “It’s horrible seeing someone pass on like that.”

    Lenoir had a message to community following the shooting.

    “It’s horrible the way our young people are responding to anger, to frustration, to their fears, to whatever issues they’re experiencing, it’s a low-down shame and I think it should quit. If you have problems, I think you should talk to your pastor, talk to someone that can help you, not to respond violently.”

    We can expect the race pimps to highlight one aspect of the terrible shooting;

    Investigators believe that a white vehicle may be involved, according to Miami-Dade Police.

    All of the people involved were apparently black, but we can be sure that somehow the white vehicle will bear the brunt of the blame. Well, the car and the guns which jumped out of the white car and began firing on their own.

  • At the intersection of CeLo & TSO

    Kevin sent us this photo from last night’s “The Voice” of Ce-Lo green wearing a Good Conduct Medal and a Navy Aviation Warfare badge. I have nothing against Ce-Lo, I enjoy his music because it reminds me of the old Motown sound, and I loves me some Motown.

    I just think this is funny because TSO is doing battle with his old unit over a Good Conduct Medal that he earned years ago. For the record, they initiated the paperwork, he didn’t go begging for the medal. But, I’m sure that if he had known that he could just pin the damn thing on like Ce-Lo, he could have avoided the headaches.

    I hope Ce-Lo doesn’t get full of himself and think the wings can make him fly now. And TSO is already mad at me for something I did yesterday, so what’s wrong with a little more poking of the bear?

    Some Ce-Lo below the jump (not explicit);
    (more…)

  • Citizen soldiers no more?

    Paul Huard, a high school teacher, military father and former journalist, published a piece in The Oregonian this past weekend talking about the increasing disconnect between Americans and their professional military.

    Sometime in February, I will quietly remove a small pennant that has been a fixture in my classroom for more than six years. It is a Blue Star service flag, the symbol of a son or daughter on active duty in the U.S. military and a tradition dating back to 1942 when the banner allowed mothers to show publicly a child was fighting as a soldier, Marine, sailor or airman. Each star represented one child, and many families had flags with multiple stars. Entire neighborhoods often had these flags in their windows during World War II, and people were proud to display them.

    —

    …experience and education have shown me that for better or for worse the American soldier and America’s wars are things that educated people need to understand for the sake of understanding and keeping American democracy.

    —

    …awareness is becoming harder and harder to find in a nation where few choose to serve. About 1 percent of the nation’s population is currently in uniform as either active duty or reserve such as the National Guard, and that number will dwindle as factors such as budget cuts and the inevitable drawdown because of the end of the Iraq War take effect. During World War II, about 12 percent of the population was in uniform.

    —

    Because of the hatred expressed by the counterculture during the’60s toward returning Vietnam vets or because society today lives like a nearly nine-year war had no impact on the lives of a majority of Americans, we owe the military a free lunch at every Applebee’s from coast to coast. Most of the young people I know in the military just wish the average American understood what the military does and why it does it. They are grateful for the meal, but they want their fellow citizens to understand what the military does, how it gets the job done, and what the military should (or should not) be asked to do.

    —

    When Matt enlisted, a few friends and acquaintances asked me how I felt about sacrificing my son. I replied by stating that I was not sacrificing my son, but that I was supporting his informed decision, a decision that he made as an adult. He had other options in life. He received excellent advice from two veterans: a grandfather who served in the U.S. Army during World War II and a grandfather who served in the U.S. Army during the Cold War. He knew exactly what he was doing.

    The crux of Huard’s argument is that military service has disappeared from the common American experience, that military culture is no longer American culture. I happen to believe this is true and, like Huard, I find it to be a disturbing development. A culture apart from its military is not only more likely to fail to give its military the tools it needs for successfully defending the national interest, it more likely to misuse and ignorantly abuse, or allow the abuse, of its military.

    The ancient, and very Western, tradition of the citizen solider is crucial to the heath of any Republic but the demands of both modern warfare and personal liberty require a force of professional volunteers. It’s a balancing act that we’re failing at. We’re returning to a system of military clans, separate in culture and social status from the general population. Most American families and their soft, spoiled and entitled children don’t even conceive of military service as an option much less an opportunity. Yet nearly everyone I’ve known in the military either has kids in or are themselves children of veterans.

  • Reality, fantasy and you.

    Seems that one employee is having a hard time understanding the difference. Because if he is real I would say that the only conflict he has seen has been a conflict of interest. See for yourself.

    (I) was in gamestop, and spotted an employee (who is apparently serving in the national guard) in full acu’s minus his name plate, new balance tennis shoes and a gamestop t-shirt under his unzipped top. My husband ( who is ad army) called the dm and was told he was wearing his uniform to promote the release of cod mw3, and didn’t see what the problem was, seriously?

  • Friends don’t let Friends plank (it planks to be you.)

    It seems that the person above was given a three hundred dollar fine and free public humiliation for a planking spree according to the police. I am sure that the Police thought that it was a gas when he was laying on top of of a memorial to their own who have fallen in the line of duty.

    Judge Steven Olson fined Hart $303 for his escapades, which were photographed by his brother Ryan, who himself faces a disorderly conduct trial next week.

    Ryan Hart apparently upset police by lying across a police memorial monument in front of the county jail.

    So just remember, just say no to planking.