Tag: veterans

If it wasn’t bad enough that so called “meritorious persons” are receiving much more lavish government benefits than veterans, now certain veterans may not even be able to get buried in a national cemetery:

A controversy surfaced when the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans pursued an initiative to cancel burial benefits for military veterans with less than 20 years service but more than 10 years service and instead make room for the burial of those who participated in candlelight protests and those designated as “Democracy Movement Meritorious Persons.”  This means certain military veterans will no longer be eligible to be buried at the national cemeteries. The Korean War Veterans Association and other veterans groups strongly opposed the move.

East Asia Research Center

You can read much more at the link.

I have been dubious of the viral Go Fund Me campaign for a homeless veteran that raised $400,000 last year and thus did not promote it on this site.  Sure enough it was a fraud:

Mr Bobbitt and the couple first came to prominence in November 2017 when Ms McClure launched a crowdfunding GoFundMe campaign, which, they said, was to re-pay the debt of a homeless man who came to her aid at the side of a road.

A photograph of Ms McClure and Mr Bobbitt, a veteran and drug addict who had lived on the streets for several years, standing on the side of the road, fronted the fundraising campaign.

More than 14,000 people donated, many inspired by the story’s details, such as Mr Bobbitt instructing Ms McClure to lock her car doors before he returned with a can of petrol.

Officials said on Thursday they believe the photo was staged after the three met previously when Ms McClure and Mr D’Amico visited a casino near an underpass where Mr Bobbitt spent time.  [BBC]

You can read the rest at the link, but they would have gotten away with this fraud if it wasn’t for the fact that Bobbitt sued McClure and D’Amico for more money than what they had given him.  This caused an investigation which led to the discovery of the fraud.

This fraud is exactly why I have never given any money to Go Fund Me and I am very particular on where I donate my money to.  I recommend everyone else should do so as well.

North Korea’s Korean War veterans arrive in Pyongyang on July 25, 2018, to attend an event there in this photo carried by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).  (Yonhap)

This sounds like much to do about nothing:

Russian trolls and others aligned with the Kremlin are injecting disinformation into streams of online content flowing to American military personnel and veterans on Twitter and Facebook, according to an Oxford University study released Monday.

The researchers found fake or slanted news from Russian-controlled accounts are mixing with a wide range of legitimate content consumed by veterans and active-duty personnel in their Facebook and Twitter news feeds. These groups were found to be reading and sharing articles on conservative political thought, articles on right-wing politics in Europe and writing touting various conspiracy theories.  [Washington Post]

Sounds scary right that the US military is being influenced by Russian misinformation?  Here is what the study really found out:

The kind of information shared by and with veterans and active-duty personnel span a wide range, with liberal political content also common, though not as common as conservative political content. The online military community, the researchers found, also shared links about sustainable agriculture, mental health issues such as addiction, and conspiracy theories.

No one subject dominated the online content flowing among these communities, but the largest individual categories dealt with military or veteran matters. Russian disinformation was a smaller but significant and persistent part of the overall information flow.

So basically the Russian disinformation was irrelevant.  This article could not even cite one piece of disinformation that had any effect on veterans.  The Washington Post even headlines this story with “Russian operatives used Twitter and Facebook to target veterans and military personnel, study says”.  The Washington Post could have more accurately titled this article “Study Finds Veterans Follow Military and Veterans Matters Online; Russian Disinformation Has No Proven Effect”.

The bottom line is that the Internet is filled with disinformation and people need to use critical thinking to sift through what is real and what is not.

It sounds like someone decided to publish something outrageous to get it to go viral to bring attention to their newsletter.  If that was the plan it worked:

A newsletter posted on the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) campus is starting to make the rounds on social media and it states veterans should be banned from four-year universities. Several viewers asked 11 News to look into the origin of the newsletter.

The letter states military veterans should be banned from classes and compares the military culture to white supremacist groups.

The newsletter is titled “Social Justice Collective Weekly” and says it is the first issue. A spokesperson for UCCS said the newsletter has nothing to do with the school and does not represent the institution’s views. However, it was approved by the university and posted on a bulletin board. The school says anyone is allowed to post items on the board.

The university explained while this group is not affiliated with the college, they say it is free speech and the group can post what they want.

The article says veterans should be banned from UCCS and other four-year colleges. It also generalizes veterans and says they are unsympathetic to the LGBTQ community. The article says all veterans have far right-wing ideologies.  [KKTV]

You can read more at the link, but I think the real story with this is if the university would have allowed a racist hate group to distribute such a newsletter around campus?

Also of note is that I got to learn from this newsletter what a LGBTQQIP2SAA is.

It would be interesting to see what the leading causes for veterans leaving government jobs is since the article does not really provide one.  I think it could be the difference in culture where in the military you have a team and can do attitude that maybe is not replicated in the government sector.  Does anyone else have any theories on the high attrition rate?:

The share of federal jobs going to veterans is at its highest level in five years, new data shows, with former servicemembers comprising almost half of full-time hires in the last fiscal year.

One in three people in government is now a veteran, proof that the White House’s six-year push to give those who served in the military a leg up in the long hiring queue for federal jobs is working.

The bad news is that once veterans get into government, they don’t stay long. They’re more likely to leave their jobs within two years than non-veterans, the Office of Personnel Management reports, even if they’ve transferred from other federal agencies.

The Small Business Administration had the most trouble keeping veterans in fiscal 2014, with just 62 percent staying two years or more, compared to 88 percent of non-veterans. Former service members left the Commerce Department at similar rates, with 68 percent staying two years or more compared to 82 percent for non-veterans.

Even the Department of Veterans Affairs, traditionally a draw for former troops, lost a little more than a quarter of its veterans within two years, compared to 20 percent of its non-veterans.

The only agencies that kept more veterans than non-veterans on board were the Defense and State Departments, the report released last month shows.

The growing presence in government of men and women with military backgrounds is the most visible federal effort to reward military service since the draft ended in the 1970s. President Barack Obama pushed agencies to increase hiring of veterans starting in 2009, in response to the bleak employment prospects many service members faced after coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The initiative has fueled tensions in federal offices, though, as longtime civil servants and former troops on the other side of the cubicle question each other’s competence and qualifications.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

I don’t see Hollywood changing their stereotype of military veterans any time soon even with this film festival:

My stepbrother is in the military, and he always wishes that the movies would be a better advocate for the American soldier,” actor Ethan Hawke said during an interview to promote “Good Kill,” a new drama about drone warfare. “Hollywood has a bad habit of either being so nationalistic and flag-waving that it kind of dehumanizes everybody and makes it a recruitment tool, or being so left-wing with conspiracy theories that project all of this negativity. Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

The GI Film Festival opens in Washington this week in its ninth year as a corrective to the one-dimensional portrayals that many observers fear have influenced how the public sees the military. The festival runs May 18 through May 24 and features 60 movies, including shorts, documentaries, comedies and dramas. All are either made by veterans or feature military characters.

At a time when only 0.5 percent of the population is on active duty, many in the military community argue that even the cinema offerings that attempt to give a sympathetic portrayal of soldiers and veterans — such as the acclaimed “American Sniper” — end up breeding harmful stereotypes.

Recent films have also portrayed vets as murderers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (“In the Valley of Elah,” “Redacted”); as deserters suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (“Stop-Loss”); and as mavericks so addicted to combat that they can’t reintegrate into American society (“The Hurt Locker”).

“People believe what they see in the movies,” said Laura Law-Millett, a veteran who founded the GI Film Festival with her civilian husband, Brandon Millett. “If someone had seen some of these films who had never met anyone in the military, prior to about 2007, they would say, ‘Oh, so everyone who joins the Army becomes a drug dealer or a rapist or a murderer?'”  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but with Bush out of office the amount of movies and documentaries depicting troops as murderers and rapists seems to have decreased.  It seems now they focus more on veterans being heroic or broken from PTSD. 

This sounds more like the spouse thinking she wears the rank of the servicemember their married to:

My wife and I own a couple of smoothie/food shops. As small-business entrepreneurs, we take a lot of pride in providing 55 jobs while making payroll every week, all self-financed as saved- and scrimped-for investment capital. As owners, we choose to offer a 10 percent discount to first-responders and active-duty/reserve military and guardsmen. Which is where I get to my rub.

Recently, I had a military spouse grow irate with my cashier because we didn’t offer a discount to military family members. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened. I guess I could stop offering any discount at all to the military, but would rather not. In this particular case, my cashier was on the receiving end of a very long tirade about how obviously unappreciative ownership must be of the sacrifices of the military family. The woman ended by stating “it would be in the owner’s best interest” to offer discounts to families as well. I wish I was there to find out exactly what she meant beyond her vague threat.

Her response, I believe, had nothing to do with my veteran-owned business being unappreciative of military families (we know firsthand about the hardships endured on the home front), and everything to do with the growing sense in our active and retired military community that as a group its members should be catered to because of their service. This is terribly misplaced and hurts civil-military relations, as well as sullies our service to this great nation.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link,but no business should be expected to give military discounts like this woman wanted.

Here is a pretty cool story involving a Korean War veteran:

Early last month, Chip Herrington was headed back to Alabama, where he lives, from Mississippi, where he happened to be working that day. As he drove, Herrington, an attorney, saw some antique and pawn shops along the roadway and decided to stop and take a look around.

That’s when Herrington spotted it — an old military sword, resting in a butter churn next to the bat and gun barrel at the Mississippi shop.

“I saw what I knew to be an old Navy officer’s sword,” Herrington told The Post in a phone interview this week. “I love that kind of stuff, and it was a good price, I thought. So I bought it for $40.”

The sword was listed as a Civil War-era piece of equipment, even though it wasn’t. And the scabbard wasn’t in great shape — the leather peeling away — but Herrington said he understood what he had was once valuable to someone.

“I knew exactly what it was when I saw it,” Herrington said.

When Herrington got home and took a closer look at the sword, he noticed that it was inscribed with a name — ROY M. JOHNSEN, written in all caps, just like that.  [Washington Post]

You can read the rest at the link, but Herrington was able to track down Roy M. Johnsen and found out that he was a 88 year old Korean War veteran who had the sword stolen decades ago.

A Marine who lost a leg while serving in Afghanistan explains what it was like to summit Mt. Vinson in Antarctica http://t.co/fN3mg4edJS

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 13, 2015