By GI Korea on January 9th, 2011 at 3:11 am

ROK Drop Open Thread – January 09, 2011

» by GI Korea in: Open Threads

If you have any links or topics you would like to discuss here is your chance.

Tags: Open Threads

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Glans
8:30 pm on January 8th, 2011 1
Open Threat? GI Korea, this is one spelling error that you really should correct.
surprisesaplenty
8:38 pm on January 8th, 2011 2
No, don't change the spelling. The name is great for a mil-blogger and I am not even being sarcastic this time.

I hope the Gifford shooting isn't related to organized politics and is the result of a lone gunman as the early evidence suggests.
ChickenHead
9:08 pm on January 8th, 2011 3
Open Threat?

Well… OK… let's see.

I'm going to beat you so hard you will look like the afterbirth of a Mongolian gang bang.
kevin landry
10:32 pm on January 8th, 2011 4
I clicked from twitter thinking the rebpublic of Korea stopped (dropped) their open threat about something. lol
JoeC
10:57 pm on January 8th, 2011 5
As I suggested a few times here before and as any single service member can attest, it is the married service member who are the true recipients of the infamous "special privileges." Now, a new study gives more support to that suspicion.

<a>Why Do So Many Military Marriages End in Divorce?

According to this Rand study, the answer often is, they realized they will no longer have those privileges after leaving the military.

A Rand Corp. report issued in 2007 by UCLA social psychology professor Benjamin Karney noted that divorce in the military is substantially higher among females than males, but overall rates are no higher than for civilians. The findings suggest that the military provides incentives, such as pay, benefits and housing, for both sexes to marry, and for men to stay married. But these incentives disappear when service members return to civilian life, and they suffer higher rates of separation and divorce. The military may be encouraging unions that would not be formalized into marriage if the dating couple were civilians, and these may be more fragile upon exit from the military, Karney suggested.

USFK made a big deal a few years ago, requiring a series of counseling sessions for all GI's planning to marry a foreign bride over here. Should that become standard policy for all military members intending to get married?

Is the military incentivizing weak marriages? This could be the inverse of how welfare encourages single parent families. Maybe Sec. Gates can address this and have an excuse to eliminate some more military entitlements at the same time.
JoeC
10:59 pm on January 8th, 2011 6
The link for the article didn't work. Here it is:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/228303-why-do-s…
archieb
11:03 pm on January 8th, 2011 7
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/…

Bus driver convicted after injuring sexual assaulter

By Han Sang-hee

A bus driver who injured a sexual molester during an attempt to prevent him from assaulting another person was convicted of assault Sunday.

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced a 50-year-old bus driver to six months in jail, suspended for two years, after he injured a male student who molested a female passenger and then attacked a female escort on a school bus.

Last May, a male student at a school for the disabled, started groping and sexually harassing a female student who was sitting in front of him on the bus.

When a female employee from the school told the female student to change seats, the male student got angry and attacked her, pushing her down and pressing himself on top of her.

The driver stopped the bus, and went to intervene but ended up injuring the student’s eye in the process.

“Although the injury took place while the bus driver was trying to stop the male student from making a scene, he injured him and it required six weeks of hospital treatment. Also he did not come to any settlement with the student,” the court said in a ruling.
LG DACOM Stinks, Roy
11:13 pm on January 8th, 2011 8
JoeC, yes, many marriages in the military are weak, as should be unions consisting of at least one person who is young, aimless in his/her personal affairs, who comes from limited means, and who is generally disenfranchised by society.
setnaffa
12:10 am on January 9th, 2011 9
Sad about the bus driver. That judge ought to be ashamed. But IIRC, Korean law protects the one who was most seriously damaged, regardless of who started the fight.

I miss living in Korea. I only get over there about once every three years; but I love the colorful environment. Sure there are lots of warts and pimples, just like anywhere (The streets of neither Washington, Moscow, London, nor Beijing are "paved with gold"); but the people are generally warm and open once they know how to place you in their Confucian hierarchy.

It's tough being an ex-smoker and being subjected to those who are not (including most cabbies, it seems); but there are restaurants and hotels and every other kind of business that makes living there nearly as comfortable as Dallas.
GI Korea
12:41 am on January 9th, 2011 10
The misspelling has been fixed. Darn that was an embarrassing one.
setnaffa
12:42 am on January 9th, 2011 11
GI, it was fine either way…
jhpigott
2:54 am on January 9th, 2011 12
Hearing some rumblings of a purge that may be directed at Jang Sung-taek
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/01…

If true, he will not be an easy nut to crack. Things may be going really wrong if the Kims feel it necessary to take down Sung-taek.
Greg
3:39 am on January 9th, 2011 13
Overweight female Kpop group, Piggy Dolls, debuts.

http://www.allkpop.com/2011/01/new-girl-group-pig…
ChickenHead
3:44 am on January 9th, 2011 14
Tron in 4D. Just got back. Rocks.
setnaffa
5:17 am on January 9th, 2011 15
4d? Time travel?
ChickenHead
5:48 am on January 9th, 2011 16
Setnaffa,

Ah, yes… 4D.

IMAX 3D screen with chairs that go up and down as well as lean in all directions. There are also several things that poke your back and behind… so you feel it poking around you when a guy gets knocked down and goes rolling across the floor or a lightcycle takes a good hit… just don't watch any gay poorn.

Then there is wind in you face for motion scenes as well as pulses of air from different directions for shock effect.

There are also scents… smelled like a hint of burning rubber to me for a motorcycle scene and floral scent shampoo for an outdoor scene… again, stay away from the poorn here… unless you like to sniff the tissue.

There is supposed to be mist but I didn't get any… no real place for it in Tron. Again, stay away from the poorn… unless you want a pearl necklace.

There are also strobes and lasers in the theater… only used once so they were not intrusive.

The moving chairs coupled with the motion scenes put that rollercoaster chill in my guts a couple times… pretty rockin'.

And, yes, there was time travel… about two hours into the future when it was all done.

Avatar would rock with this.
jhpigott
6:35 am on January 9th, 2011 17
Open Radio for North Korea, a broadcast run by North Korean defectors for transmission into the North, cited an unnamed source as saying that the North Korean authorities had decided not to designate the birthday as a public holiday and gone into special alert for two days from Friday for fear of a public outburst of disapproval of Kim Jong-un's succession.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2011/0…
Glans
9:13 am on January 11th, 2011 18
ChickenHead 16, they need to be careful with those scents. Law enforcement may think the theater is a marijuana grow-op. Just sayin'.
Greg
1:25 pm on January 11th, 2011 19
Italy's plastic bag ban could affect military exchanges, commissaries

http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/mediterranean/…
Leon LaPorte
3:44 pm on January 11th, 2011 20
Another one, and this time it's a trans-testicle.

Transgender vets want military access for own

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Before handcuffing herself to the White House fence, former Petty Officer First Class Autumn Sandeen carefully pinned three rows of Navy ribbons to her chest. Her regulation dress blue skirt, fitted jacket, hat and black pumps were new – fitting for a woman who spent two decades serving her country as a man.

Sandeen was the only transgender person among the six veterans arrested in April while protesting the military's ban on openly gay troops. But when she watched President Barack Obama last month sign the hard-fought bill allowing for the ban's repeal, melancholy tinged her satisfaction.

"This is another bridesmaid moment for the transgender community," the 51-year-old San Diego resident said.

The "don't ask, don't tell" policy now heading toward history does not apply to transgender recruits, who are automatically disqualified as unfit for service. But the military's long-standing posture on gender-identity has not prevented transgender citizens from signing up before they come out, or from obtaining psychological counseling, hormones and routine health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs once they return to civilian life.

So as the Pentagon prepares to welcome openly gay, lesbian and bisexual service members for the first time, Sandeen is not alone in hoping the United States will one day join the seven other nations – Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, the Czech Republic, Thailand and Australia – that allow transgender troops.

"There is really no question, it's just a matter of when," said former Army Capt. Allyson Robinson, 40, a 1994 West Point graduate who has spoken to sociology classes at the alma mater she attended as a male cadet. "There are active-duty, as well as reserve and national guard transgender service members, serving today."

No one knows how many transgender people are serving or have served. Neither the Department of Defense nor the VA keep statistics on how many service members have been discharged or treated for transgender conditions or conduct.

The Transgender American Veterans Association, an advocacy group founded in 2003, estimates there could be as many as 300,000 transgender people among the nation's 26 million veterans.

When 50 TAVA members laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier six years ago, representatives from every U.S. conflict since World War II were there, said former Navy Machinist Mate First Class Monica Helms, the group's co-founder and president.

Most had spent years, if not decades, as veterans before they could acknowledge the mismatches between their brains and their bodies. Helms, 59, spent four years in the engine room of a nuclear submarine during the Vietnam War, but did not start living as Monica until 1997.

Military regulations state that men and women who identify with or present a gender different from their sex at birth have mental conditions that make them ineligible to serve. Those who have undergone genital surgery are listed as having physical abnormalities. Service members caught cross-dressing on base have been court-martialed for interfering with "good order and discipline," according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Until the American Psychiatric Association removes Gender Identity Disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as it did for homosexuality in 1973, that's likely to remain the case, Sandeen said.

The very diagnosis that keeps transgender Americans out of uniform has enabled some to obtain transition-related medical care and other services when they become veterans.

Federal law prohibits Veterans Health Administration (VA) facilities from performing or paying for sex-change surgeries. But some VA medical centers provide psychological counseling, sex hormones, speech therapy and other medical treatment short of gender reassignment surgery.

Sandeen said the VA hospital in San Diego made it possible for her to start living as a woman once she retired from the Navy a decade ago.

"As soon as I got an appointment with the psychiatry department, the first thing I said to them is, 'I have gender issues. I don't know if I'm a transvestite or a transsexual or if I'm something in between, but I need to work this out with a therapist,'" she recalled.

She eventually received a recommendation to see a VA doctor who could prescribe estrogen to help her grow breasts and hips and diminish body and facial hair. The endocrinologist told her she first would have to try presenting herself as a woman for two-and-half-months.

Sandeen, already classified as a disabled vet with bipolar disorder, had lined up a work-study job at the hospital's patient health library.

"February 6, 2003, my first day of being publicly female, I was working for $10 an hour at the VA helping other vets with health care needs," she said. "The VA is the organization that helped me work this out."

The attention Sandeen received as a veteran is not unusual, but not universal, transgender advocates say. In response to complaints that some transgender veterans have been treated disrespectfully or denied care at VA facilities, Helms' group has lobbied the Veterans Affairs department to issue guidelines on services to which transgender patients are entitled.

San Diego resident Zander Keig, who was a woman during a two-year stint with the Coast Guard, had been on testosterone for a year when he wanted his prescription transferred from a suburban VA clinic. But veterans are not allowed to change their names on discharge papers so he was directed to the women's VA clinic in San Francisco.

Keig, 44, said a senior physician there "grilled me with questions. Why are you taking T? Do you know what it's doing to your body? How are you eligible for these services?"

"I said, 'I established my eligibility for VA services in 1988, I have every reason to be here. Am I going to get my shots or not?'" Keig recalled. He did get his injections.

In 2007, the VA complex in Boston became the first veterans' medical provider to draft a policy designed to assure transgender veterans received consistent and sensitive care.

Department of Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Katie Roberts said the VA is reviewing the Boston policy and others, hoping to create a formal directive in the "near future."

"As all veterans served this nation with the same expectation of honor and excellence, VA strives to provide all veterans equitable treatment respecting their honor by providing medical services with excellence," she said.

Even with the enormous changes in their lives, many transgender veterans maintain connections with their military service. Sandeen still shops at a Navy commissary and grabs her military identification when she goes walking. Robinson considers her four years as a West Point cadet the best of her life, although she feared being caught with women's clothes in her trunk.

"I love this country and I felt a personal calling to express that love of America through my willingness to sacrifice," she said.

But when Robinson made her triumphant return to the academy for her speaking engagement, along with the congratulations, came comments that she was unworthy to be part of the "Long Gray Line."

"It was as though the service I had rendered was suddenly worthless," she said.

Former Air Force Sgt. Nicole Shounder, 52, who underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1999, has spent the last four years wearing a uniform at sea, first with the Coast Guard auxiliary and now, as a civil service mariner nurse aboard the USNS Robert E Perry, which recently supplied deployments in the Mediterranean.

Shounder considers it a privilege to wear Navy-issued collar brass and shoulder boards.

"Given my circumstances, it really is," she said. "Essentially until someone can say otherwise, I am probably the only out and open post-op transsexual in uniform for the Navy, or as close as you can be."
ChickenHead
4:35 pm on January 11th, 2011 21
Leon,

DADT applied to transgenders as well, didn't it?

That's the only way some of the behemoth "women" in the military can properly be explained.

But here is a better question.

It said, "Service members caught cross-dressing on base have been court-martialed for interfering with “good order and discipline"

This seems to mean only MALE crossdressers.

In yet another double standard, when women dress like men, it's all cool. So much for equality.

When political correctness has two paths, it always takes the one which leads to the ugliest result regardless of fairness, equality, or consideration of a greater good.
Glans
10:34 pm on January 13th, 2011 22
The father of the modern Chinese Nave Liu Huaqing has died.
Dragonfly
12:26 am on January 14th, 2011 23
Speaking of China, how about that new stealth fighter of theirs? The End of Days is rapidly approaching as evidenced by China's economic dominance which enables them to invest extra billion$ into their military.
ChickenHead
10:53 pm on January 14th, 2011 24
Leon,

This one is for you, buddy.

Have fun at your next formal occasion.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/13/cthulhu-the-…