Yes, we get a lot of rain here.  But when the sun shines, OMG, it's an amazing place, the most beautiful region in the United States if not on the earth.  Mt. Rainier, the Olympics, the Cascades, the Columbia River Gorge, the waters of Puget Sound, the various rain forests, the nearby ocean.  

This is a wonderful place.  

In addition, we do a great deal of work in Lakewood, WA, near Lewis/McChord, and the people there, including the military personnel are some of the friendliest and most helpful people I've ever encountered.

Feels really horrible in a way.  Those FOB for special ops, they work very closely with the local people to garner information about the local Taliban.  It is all about trust, now utterly destroyed.  They are Green Beret and SEALs, and they do have regular Army assist them and you usually have to have some very good past experience that you preformed well to be chosen to assist them.

I am used to such assisting being selected stateside though, but that is just in my little world and for those assisting on the ground outside the wire they may have always chosen those assistants in the war zone from regular Army or other branch.

The Madigan forensic psychiatry team was also famous for exposing ONE soldier who was making PTSD claims based upon witnessing a child being killed in Iraq and it did turn out that he never even deployed, but he was only one soldier.  And was it really such a feat of tremendous human performance, discovering that he had never acutally deployed?  You have his records right in front of your face!

But that was their defining moment they clung to and their claim to fame in the military.  And now all soldiers who will have to receive services from them are malingerers at the core of their being, as the world watches Fort Lewis and all those that they DON'T SERVE disintegrate.

I wonder if Keppler and Ellis-Billingsley ever deployed into a war theater that wasn't Kuwait during this last ten years of war too?  I don't know how such evil was allowed to bloom and flourish for so many years to such a degree.

I just watched Ryan Crocker say we can't leave Afghanistan because the Taliban will take over again, Al Qaeda will grow back stronger than ever and we will have a pre 9/11 situation all over again.  But I don't have faith in this Command environment now for some reason, there is no juice to get the right thing done no matter what for the soldiers and for the Afghans. You don't smell heads rolling in the wind like you did when Petraeus and McChrystal ran Afghanistan if you wouldn't toe the line and adhere strictly to their mission or if you put their mission in jeopardy because you weren't doing YOUR job.

Sometimes you have to go to war with the Army you broke and abused?  Is that where we are now too?  We were already here once in the recent past under Bush.  All it takes is allowing everyone their own little fiefdom in the Army, and pretty soon you have a Sunni triangle and you don't how you got here.

I'm just tired, and General John Allen doesn't inspire fear in slacker shrinks at Fort Lewis sending him broken soldiers and he should.  They should all feel their glands shrivel a little in fear putting his mission in jeopardy, and they don't.  And President Obama has never been a better military leader than his Generals, but he could be.  If John Allen and McRaven (who was given this last broken Fort Lewis soldier) don't inspire fear, Obama could if he would.  But when it sounds like he is saying "Stay the Course" after a murder spree where a broken soldier assisting special operations dons night-vision, I start feeling....well....Iraqish

As for those government guaranteed loans. Well, it is not like back in the '60s and '70s when college loans actually came from the federal government, no banks involved. Interest was just 2%.

Now, school loans come from banks and other financial companies who, because those loans are guaranteed, loan out huge sums that students will be paying for the rest of their lives. As in everything else bank-related, there is no downside to the bank for giving out ridiculously high loans.