Outstanding tutorial with excellent charts.

Sometimes I get asked why I blog. If anyone else can think of a more productive way to get this stuff off my chest, please let me know. As Sean says, it’s cheaper than therapy.
Until then, the only productive response to reporting like this, as I see it, is a response like this:

Nowhere, absolutely nowhere in the piece do we get any sort of a sense that the reporter has even the slightest clue about the purpose of all the activity around her. Fitness and marksmanship aren’t a game, they’re life-saving skills in the field. Esprit de corps and morale aren’t just fun times for the kids at a camp, they’re what hold together a unit under pressure. Soldiers don’t get to drive around in “armoured tanks” – as opposed to all the unarmoured tanks out there, right? – for fun, but rather for function. Knives aren’t sold at the PX as baubles, they’re sold because a knife is just about the most basic tool there is, and you can never have enough of them when you’re on your own in bad-guy country.
This isn’t remotely comparable to a third-world resort, as Ms. Leeder suggests, where spoiled western urbanites can pretend they’re not propping up a brutal, oppressive dictatorship with their tourist dollars as they quaff Pina Coladas at the poolside bar.
KAF exists to support a military effort in a country that still needs help securing its own territory. Everything and everyone on that base is pointed towards that effort in some way.
The fact that the Globe’s reporter can write an entire post – an entire string of posts, it seems – that gives the impression all the bustling activity on such a military installation serves no purpose other than testosterone-charged entertainment shows just how profoundly out her element she is.
Oh, and that young soldier who showed such poor judgment in making a half-heartedly obvious pass at Ms. Leeder, the one she dismissed as a “little git, who seemed barely old enough to shave?” He signed on the dotted line to give up his life if so ordered, and had the proverbial shit hit the fan at that exact moment that he was offering to feel her up, I have no doubt he would have put himself in between her and the danger without a second thought.
You’re a sheep, Ms. Leeder. A sheep among wolves, and you don’t even have the good sense to recognize the patrolling sheepdogs for what they are.

As a long-time journalist friend of mine said the other day: journalism isn’t a profession – there are no governing bodies that enforce standards like a College of Physicians does for doctors – it’s a craft, and a rather sloppy one for most “war correspondents” these days. With this episode, the bar continues to be set at stumbling height.

John Gormley Live executive producer Tammy Robert takes on the SGEU.
It looks like Gormley may well be training his replacement.