Life After Jerusalem has posted an interesting article about the selling of ambassadorships. The general public probably isn’t even aware that only about two-thirds of the ambassadors representing the United States come from the Foreign Service. The other third are “political appointees,” many of whom are being rewarded for their work for the political party currently in power.
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One aspect of Foreign Service life that you have to quickly learn to accept is that people are always on the move. Newcomers are arriving at post, others are departing post. In between the two there are shipments constantly arriving and being packed up. You get used to meeting new people one day and then scavenging through your colleague’s left over pantry the next to see what you want.
I’m a little late in posting this, but I think it is important enough that better late than never.
Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” made him a Lou-Gehrig-like symbol of the beauty and briefness of life, died Friday at his home in Chesapeake, Va. He was 47, and had lived five months longer than the six months a doctor gave him as an upside limit last August.
If you do a quick search of what is being discussed in the blogosphere regarding the Foreign Service these days, it seems to be all Obama all the time. Foreign Service Officers in Berlin were recently instructed that they could not attend Obama’s speech because it would be seen as advocating on behalf of a candidate.
Here are some photos from our recent trip to Crimea.
I noticed recently that when one does a Google search for “foreign service blogs,” this blog is the second entry that pops up right behind the Associates of the American Foreign Service Worldwide (AAFSW). It makes me feel more than a bit guilty that there were probably people out there coming to this blog for information on the Foreign Service only to find it hadn’t been updated in months. Hopefully, it will be better now.
As you can see, I’ve decided to tinker with the site a bit. I like this new theme and layout quite a bit, but I’m going to continue to customize it over the next few weeks so expect some changes and the occasional hic-up. I also upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress and I think it is much better. This upgrade also went very smoothly, unlike my last one (a major reason I stopped blogging for quite some time.) The only problem I’ve encountered is that all of my categories for my posts were deleted. I’m taking advantage of that to switch to a “tag” style of organization, but it will take a while to tag all the older posts. You’ll see the tag cloud over on the left hand side. For those of you unfamiliar with a cloud organization system, the larger the font, the more posts in that category.
I went and promised more regular entries and then proceeded to go silent for several days. I’m kind of a jerk that way. I had a good reason though. I went out of town to do a little traveling with the wife and her visiting parents. We decided to go to Crimea.
This week I was the volunteer to assist in the classified pouch run. Every so often the embassy sends and receives a batch of classified material. This requires some American officers with security clearances to go out to the airport and meet with a Diplomatic Courier who arrives with the incoming and departs with the outgoing.
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