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Friday musingsYeah, I got that same note back from Hilton. The one that went like this:
14 comments to Friday musings |
Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Relocating? SponsorsNearly 60k hits and 130k page views per month - low rates! Advertise with Lex! Stinkin' Badges For the Effort!Recent PostsPopularPagesTags1st Amendment afghanistan Araby army Blogging buffoonery china culture economy education Flying Friday Musings geopol GWOT Headlines History iran iraq Israel issues media Memory Lane Military Navy norks Oz pakistan people piracy politicians politics Politics and Culture pundits Russia seals sea stories silliness Small Stuff SoCal technology UAVs UK usaf usmc weapons WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better. Spam Blocked |
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Lex, Did you try using the migration assistant when you moved your stuff over? I’ve never used it, but everyone I know who has raves about it.
Re bootcamp – it’s beta software and there have been a few reports of people who’ve booted in to XP and are unable to get back into OS X. My advise is to go to your local compUSA/fry’s and buy a really big (300 gig or so) HD and a firewire case. (or buy one that’s already assembled. Then get a program called carbon copy cloner and run it at least once a week. If you were unlucky enough to get stuck in XP, this will save you hours of pain and suffering.
Full disclosure: As a former JO who played “you bet your bars”, I don’t have much sympathy for Senior Officers who only have moral reservations after they’ve left active duty.
Trust is the issue for me.
We (if I may be so bold) have made lots of lousy decisions in the military. Human beings and all. What really chaps my ass is that these Generals are telling the active force that careers are more important than mission or the troops. I hoped I would read of Flag Officers taking the McNamara defense. “I knew x was wrong, but didn’t speak out”. Imagine the impact if all these Generals had spoken out at the time.
They chose not to do so. They didn’t keep the faith.
If their opinions weren’t important enough to express at the time, they aren’t worth consideration now.
Fouled up.
Change ” I hoped I would read…” to “I hoped I would NEVER read…”.
Maybe too cranked up.
re Hilton: This has gotten much larger than “Brian Kelleher, General Manager….”ask them to reconsider their timeline. Another 30 days, maybe” I’ll bet Lex, that already is an emerging legal/PR tactic that they are going to default to next to get out from under the blitz. To counter I would humbly recommend zero-sum, no holds barred approach.
re- Revolt of Flags, then & now: Do not expect anyone above 0-7, any service, to do the same as those Admirals in 1949. Former SECNAV and 1st SECDEF Forrestal took it seriously enough to do the unthinkable…
While I do not doubt any serving Flag Officer’s bravery and willingness to die for their country, never assume they will do “that thing”, volunterally, which will lead to a curtailment (insert your own) of their CAREER. Recent history, last 15 years in particular, are flush with examples that prove my point.
Ah, but the axes do grind after retirement with all the requisite perks (largest being ACCESS) those of us with lesser pedigrees do not warrant…
Sickening. Is a spot on CNN (insert outlet) as a “military analyst” rerally that seductive?
B2
I find it interesting that all of the current crop general officers in revolt are either Army or Marines. Not a single USAF or USN flag officer is involved this time around. (Of course we know Gen. McPeak, former CSAF, endorsed Kerry in 2004, but he’s been quiet on Rumsfeld. So far.)
And this analysis is pretty well spot on…
I. AM. SO. JEALOUS.
of the MacBook Pro purchase. Wish you were gonna be at the conference so I could drool over it!
- hfs
Kevin – the migration assistant worked great for mirroring the desktop computer. Right down to the background pic and desktop docs. Problem was that I needed to purge the Hobbit’s profile, plus sundry other files and apps in order to build room for a windows partition. When I deleted the files, they didn’t leave the disk uniformly, and I couldn’t make the partion unless I backed up and re-formatted the startup disk. Which is where I got in trouble.
Did a complete erase and install using the OSX DVDs, and with a clean drive was able to partition the disk, then move my backed up files from a firewire external drive back into the Mac directory.
Funny thing is, I think that the windows apps run just a bit faster on the machine than the native OSX apps do…
That was a good read, Buck. I just wish everyone would stick to convention: Army and USAF senior officers are “general officers” – only Navy and CG are “flags.”
HFS – re: “Wish you were gonna be at the conference so I could drool over it!”
Wish you knew how hard it was to leave that alone
I agree w/ oldtom…I was disappointed/dissallusioned with Navy “leadership” after Tailhook and I left the Navy in part because of it (I also worked at NAVAIR in DC at the time – which probably soured my view of things too – sometimes seeing the sausage being made can ruin your taste for it). Anyway, what really chaps my ass (HT to oldtom for a most appropriate term) about this is that these guys were given high rank for just such occassion. When the civilian leadership starts heading over the cliff their responsibility (no, their DUTY) is not to jump off the stagecoch and say “I knew that was going to happen” safely from afar – they should resign in protest if they saw a wreck unfolding before them. Careers be damned at that point. Their pensions are safe and think of how popular they’d be on the Sunday gab-fests if they’d just resigned in protest. The impact of that move would be 10 times that which they’re having now, and nobody would be able to call them out on the carpet as we are doing right now. Frankly, self-serving and spineless are how I’d describe them right now.
All those chiefs and not a leader among them…how sad for the troops on the ground.
Brian
I wonder if all these generals will have the ‘courage’ to stand up in front of the families and friends of the troops whose lives were ‘endangered’ or lost by Rumsfeld’s decisions, and explain to them why they didn’t take a stand when it mattered.
Cold comfort for these families to find out in retrospect that the generals didn’t have faith in the orders they carried out, but let it happen anyway for reasons that the families will never, ever be able to fathom.
As commanding officers, these senior generals would have had to tell many a parent, wife, brother or sister of the courage and commitment to duty showed by the loved one they had just lost.
Perhaps they should now add a postscript: “I believe that your loved one lost his/her life unnecessarily because of the flawed order from above that was given to me to enact, but unfortunately my own courage and commitment was not up to the task of saying so at the time. However, now that I have retired, it is easier for me to come clean about it from behind the safety of my pension and other considerable benefits.
We should both be grateful that although your loved one’s life was lost/endangered, my career was saved so that I can now speak out against future ill-conceived and executed decisions. I am sure your loved one would be glad that their lives were lost in such an honourable cause.”
For what it’s worth, here’s a theory that I think explains at least some of the motivation behind the “get Rummy” crowd. If you think back to late summer 2001, SECDEF was getting it from all sides. Entrenched powers that be in the Pentagon were pushing back hard and of course, the unbelievably biased and lazy journos were onboard. Me? I think, absent 911, that Secretary Rumsfeld would have been a dot before year’s end, which would have meant that he wouldn’t have lasted a year in the job. 911 changed all that of course. I think that what we’re seeing now is a reattack. I actually heard one flag officer say on CNN Friday night that he’s speaking out because of Rumsfeld’s “arrogance.” Astoundingly immature and disappointing in anyone, let alone a flag officer. But then, Wesley Clark became a Democrat because the President didn’t return his calls. Colossal egos don’t always make for quality leaders. Nice post Lex.
Lex, if the MacBook thing doesn’t turn out, I’d be willing to sacrifice, you know, to help out. Well, I’d pay shipping, at least. Driving down to pick it up from your doorstep might be a bit much. Probably. Maybe. Just trying to be helpful.
Before you set yourself to a future of rebooting to switch between operating systems, I have one word of advice for you: Virtualization. As in, running multiple operating systems at the same time. Having done both, it’s a lot more convenient than rebooting.
Take a look at a company called Parallels who just released a beta of their virtualization application, and it supports a lot more than just XP, not that that’s a bad thing, of course. http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/
Like BootCamp, it’s in beta. I have no connection with either product, but I’m keeping an eye peeled in both directions. (Ouch. Makes me sound like a chameleon.)
Have fun.
re: Admirals Revolt.
No better a guy to make flag than D.V. Gallery…
Need more like him today.
Lex ~ re: “Wish you knew how hard it was to leave that alone ”
I was talking about the COMPUTER…sheesh!
- hfs