Saturday, September 26, 2009
amcop funfacts
The [US] military has more uniformed personnel in Mississippi than the State Department has diplomats worldwide. The military has more full colonels/Navy captains than the State Department has diplomats. The military has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. The Defense Department has almost as many lawyers as the State Department has diplomats.(link)
More people playing John Phillip Souza ditties than diplomats. Those songs suck too. Couldn't they at least play something good? I could see a small army of marching musicians playing, say, Fugazi songs or even showtunes doing more for global stability than our diplomatic corps. But the wheezy, flatulent, snoozealongs of 100 years ago? Really? Maybe that shit got people riled and ready to kill back when life's greatest excitement was fucking your cousin until Pa brained you with a jug of moonshine, but Souza would soothe the savage breast of even the most bloodthirsty xenophobic cracker meth-head with a Soldier of Fortune subscription. No wonder the US doesn't win wars.
Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that in the decade from 1998 through 2007, another field was outgrowing, and perhaps growing at the expense of, traditional journalism. The number of people working as “reporters and correspondents” declined slightly in that period, from 52,380 in 1998 to 51,620 in 2007. But the number of public relations specialists more than doubled, from 98,240 to 225,880.
More PR flacks than journalists by an order of magnitude. (shock horror)
posted by Scats : 9/26/2009 09:55:00 PM
