Day: July 14, 2020

Closing Thought–14Jul20

The most often used political prop is the American flag…..and that is followed closely by the veterans and their issues.

Candidates take every opportunity to make it appear that they actually care about the plight of our brave veterans. This is is a LIE….if they all cared so much then why are our vets having to beg for the benefits that were promised to them for their service to the country.

And then there are all the wasted funds and give aways to buddies of the managing teams….like the one from 2018……

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The ward is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. 

This week, our award is going to the Department of Veteran Affairs for awarding a $5 million contract to a company whose owners, according to a report by the department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), had a personal relationship with Peter Shelby, the VA’s then-assistant secretary for human resources and administration.The contract “resulted entirely in waste,” the OIG determined.

In February 2018, the recently appointed Shelby awarded a one-year contract to a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. The small business, which remains unnamed in the IG report, was supposed to provide leadership and development trainings, in addition to talent assessment services that could be employed for hiring and promotion decisions.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/waste-fraud-and-abuse/va-spent-5-million-entirely-wasteful-contract-went-friend-dept

So the moral of this story is when your politician uses the local vets as a prop and promises to do miraculous thongs for them…..he is LYING!

Our veterans deserve better than this country has done dating all the way back to World War One.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

The Legion Is Our Fatherland

I was an a combat vet of the Vietnam War and when I returned to normal society I could not “fit” in…..it was difficult to go from intense situations of combat to the mundane crap of “normal” society.

I went through several jobs nothing was clicking for me and I then considered after talking to a friend to join the French Foreign Legion….luckily for me my wife was pregnant and I did not want to leave before my daughter was born.

The Legion is a fascinating history…..

The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French officers but built of volunteers from around the world. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy knoll on a farm in France near the Pyrenees. They were new recruits sitting back-to-back on two rows of steel chairs. They wore camouflage fatigues and face paint, and held French assault rifles. The chairs were meant to represent the benches in a helicopter flying into action—say, somewhere in Africa in the next few years to come. Two recruits who had been injured while running sat facing forward holding crutches. They were the pilots. Their job was to sit there and endure. The job of the others was to wait for the imaginary touchdown, then disembark from the imaginary helicopter and pretend to secure the imaginary landing zone. Those who charged into the imaginary tail rotor or committed some other blunder would have push-ups to do immediately, counting them off in phonetic French—uh, du, tra, katra, sank. If they ran out of vocabulary, they would have to start again. Eventually the recruits would stage a phased retreat back to their chairs, then take off, fly around for a while, and come in for another dangerous landing. The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. Forget your civilian reflexes. War has its own logic. Be smart. For you the fighting does not require a purpose. It does not require your allegiance to France. The motto of the Legion is Legio Patria Nostra. The Legion is our fatherland. This means we will accept you. We will shelter you. We may send you out to die. Women are not admitted. Service to the Legion is about simplifying men’s lives.

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/12/french-foreign-legion-expendables

The Legion can trace their history back to 1481 and the Swiss Hundred (cent suisse)…..a unit of 100 elite soldiers to King Louis XI….(but check out the history of this legendary unit)…

French Foreign Legion History

But the legion of today was the answer to a pressing problem for France…..

The legion was conceived as a provisional solution to a fleeting problem —the migration of undesirable persons into France in the wake of revolutions throughout Europe in 1830–31.

In retrospect, a military remedy to illegal immigration appears both contemporary and imaginative. The July Revolution of 1830 had resuscitated the French Revolutionary concept of a citizen army and led to disbandment of the Swiss Guards and other foreign formations that had enforced Bourbon mastery of such uprisings. To address the resulting coagulation of refugees in French cities, King Louis-Philippe on March 9, 1831, signed into law an act creating a ghetto foreign force within a citizen army. Recruiters quickly enlisted the undesirable aliens and packed them off to Algiers — et adieu, la Légion!

https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2017/12/21/what-ever-happened-to-the-french-foreign-legion/

After reading this post (I presume that it was read) and you fancy yourself a Legionaire……I can help with that as well…..https://en.legion-recrute.com/

This is a fascinating unit and their history of bravery and honor is storied…..

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I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Bastille Day

Today, 14 July, is when the French celebrate their revolution that overthrew the corrupt monarchy…..lead by the slogan….Liberty, Equality, Fraternity…..but was it all that equal and what about liberty……

The American attitude toward the French Revolution has been generally favorable—naturally enough for a nation itself born in revolution. But as revolutions go, the French one in 1789 was among the worst. True, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, it overthrew a corrupt regime. Yet what these fine ideals led to was, first, the Terror and mass murder in France, and then Napoleon and his wars, which took hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and Russia. After this pointless slaughter came the restoration of the same corrupt regime that the Revolution overthrew. Aside from immense suffering, the upheaval achieved nothing.

Leading the betrayal of the Revolution’s initial ideals and its transformation into a murderous ideological tyranny was Maximilien Robespierre, a monster who set up a system expressly aimed at killing thousands of innocents. He knew exactly what he was doing, meant to do it, and believed he was right to do it. He is the prototype of a particularly odious kind of evildoer: the ideologue who believes that reason and morality are on the side of his butcheries. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are of the same mold. They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first. Understanding his motives and rationale deepens our understanding of the worst horrors of the recent past and those that may lurk in the future.

Historians distinguish three phases of the French Revolution. The last, the Terror, ran roughly during 1793–94. It began with the fall of the moderate Girondins and the radical Jacobins’ accession to power. As the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety, which in turn controlled the legislature (the Convention), the disputes among their factions sharpened. After an interregnum of shared power, Robespierre became dictator, and the Terror started in earnest. It took the form of the arrest, show trial, and execution of thousands of people, including the leaders of the Girondins and the opposing Jacobin factions, who were suspected of opposing—actively or passively, actually or potentially—the policies Robespierre dictated.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-robespierre-chose-terror-12935.html

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Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”