The Gories - Hey Hey We're The Gories

Even the anti-music was better in the 20th Century. 

Three Interesting American Military Contractors

What comes to mind when you hear the term “military contractor?” Years ago, I would have thought first about Blackwater in the waning years of the second Iraq war. Heavily armed civilian bully-boys who were making the big bucks after completing their enlistments in the real military. Then a young relative of mine became a civilian military contractor in Afghanistan after his second tour in the Air Force (both in Afghanistan). He was far from being a gunman. He was doing his old Air Force job, which was warehousing aviation fuel and getting trucks full of it where they needed to be. He did that for years, and he made very good money. He left that job for another one that offered about the same money, more travel, and less gut-crunching terror. When I thought about it, I realized that skills of shipping, computerized record keeping, and communications, were involved. “Military logistics” would be a good description.

That’s the way that I found out that a large number of ex-military Americans are employed at civilian jobs that support our military efforts around the world. They do a little bit of everything. Many of them still carry guns that they may someday have to use, but most seem to do more mundane things, like install and de-bug computer systems; drive trucks; install plumbing; construct barracks; or instruct locals in how to best serve the needs of the American military bases in their countries.

I traveled to California last year, and I spent a few hours sitting in a large “lounge” area at the airport in Taipei waiting for my flight to LAX. I usually get some reading done in those situations, getting up for a walk every now and again to stretch my legs a bit. On this occasion I was sitting very close to a few men who had obviously known each other for a very long time. Listening to their conversation was fascinating.

There were three of them, and they had all retired from the U.S. Navy. Two were white, and both of them had been Chief Petty Officers of some kind, I never caught the rating. The third man was a Filipino. He had been a Petty Officer himself. His rating in the Navy was commissaryman (cook), but I got no indication that that was still his trade. That last bit is very typical for the Navy of my period. I was only a couple of years older than these guys, and I had been in the Navy myself while we were all young. Even then, in the mid- to late-1960s, most black or Filipino sailors were directed to ratings having to do with food service.

The Flip always heartily agreed with the other men, fairer to say that they all always agreed. Judging by his accent, he might have been born in California. Either way, he was definitely on the team. He was, in fact, wearing an American flag t-shirt.

The two white guys were both sixty-six years old. The subject of age had come up while they were discussing their heart attacks and the various procedures that they had endured to keep them alive. They seemed to think that it had all been very funny, so much so that I wondered if they were really so cavalier about those near-death experiences or if they were “whistling past the graveyard,” laughing to forget the horror of it. They were both rather overweight; the Flip was not. The Flip had no history of medical trouble at all to report. There is a lesson there.

One of the white guys was nicknamed, “Guppy.”

All of them were returning home to America after a twenty-four-day assignment at the old Subic Bay Naval Base. It sounded like they were frequently sent to Subic Bay. Their employer kept them busy alternating assignments ranging from a few weeks to a month or so with a similar amount of time to hang out at home.

Their conversation had the same kind of high-energy jocularity that is common to much younger men in the armed forces. They appeared to be having great fun talking about whatever subject came before them. Second and third wives were an entertaining subject, and they all seemed to know each of the multiple wives for each other. There was talk of who had been “trading-up,” and a bit of who had been lucky to get rid of a certain woman. I found it odd that no children were ever mentioned, adult or otherwise.  

They also joked somewhat ruefully about the nature of their assignments. Living quarters were not always luxurious, being on many occasions simple tents. Same for the food. The locals were a fit subject for complaining. They were often a bunch of thieves whose favorite thing in the world was, “taking advantage of Americans.”  The locals could be trusted to steal any tools that were not carefully secured, and nothing was safe from their predations. “Remember that time somebody got into your tent while you were sleeping and stole your shoes?” They then marveled at how good a thief the guy was. “He even got the tent-zipper back up without waking me.”

These three were hale fellows, well met, in spite of being a bit rough around the edges. I’m sure that they had no trouble at all getting along with anyone that they worked with at their various destinations. They were fairly typical American men, and there’s still a lot that’s appealing about that. I’m pretty sure that these guys worked hard, knew what they were doing, and had long since given up starting fights just for the fun of it. (I would be amazed if they had not engaged in that behavior when they were young men. Like I say, I was in the Navy myself, and I was their contemporary.) I’m sure that they had been hard drinkers at one time too, although now they are almost certainly being more careful on doctors’ orders. Smile, get along, treat people fairly, take your work seriously, these are all traits that the world still associates with Americans.

Not a bad trio of cultural ambassadors, all things considered.

Lou Reed & Little Jimmy Scott - Walk on the Wild Side [May 1992]

I feel like I'm including this mostly as an illustration of the fact that by now, YouTube contains a whole lot more than you think it does. Whether or not you believe that things like this should exist at all, they do, and you can find them on the 'Tube. 

Why The Los Angeles Teachers' Strike Is Important To All Of Us

Teachers for the Los Angeles Unified School System are on strike. They were offered a paltry cost of living increase, and that was annoying, but that’s only a small part of the reasons for the strike.

Teachers are standing up for the general disintegration of the entire primary and secondary education system that they are part of. Class sizes are way out of hand, with over forty students being the norm; individual schools do not have a nurse on the premises, they must share one school nurse among many schools; the same is true for school psychologists, share one among a group of schools; taxpayer money is being diverted to private “charter” schools, which lowers the already diminishing budgets for the existing public schools. The teachers have ringside seats for all of these shocking developments, and they have decided to stand up and be counted. They deserve all of our support in this effort.

Charter Schools

Charter schools have only been around for twenty-five years or so. The idea is to publicly fund a local school that is then given broad latitude to run its own affairs. The hope is that such schools will thus be free to innovate new and more efficient methods of educating students. There will be no tuition charged, because the schools are publicly funded. This is the idea as it is described in the sales literature anyway.

In reality, charter schools are most often associated with large education corporations. They are run as profit centers, whether the corporations are nominally for profit or non-profit. They receive money from the state based upon the number of students, and they economize by leasing space in government buildings and hiring non-union teachers at lower than union wages. There are numerous real estate opportunities for the corporations to profit. The salaries of the executives at the school and the corporate levels can be shockingly large. 

Charter schools are expected to justify their existence by achieving better educational results than the local public schools. The fiction is that all students in the district have the freedom to choose which school to attend, but this is not quite true. Usually, the charter schools enhance their achievement statistics by cherry picking the better students from the district and washing out low-performing students, sending them back to the public schools.

Charter schools are a barely disguised excuse to move tax-payer money to private corporations and rich individuals. This is all part of an effort to degrade the American public education system that started way back in the late 1960s.

President Richard Nixon

Ah, the 1960s! The cars were fast, the girls were pretty, the music was terrific, and love was all around! Right? The actual 1960s were a lot more complicated than that.

The civil rights movement had been percolating since the late 1940s, but it didn’t really fill up its sails with wind until the early 1960s. For the record, this was a long overdue good thing, and it should have been obvious to all of us white devils that our patient and longsuffering black brothers and sisters had every right, legally, morally, in every conceivable way, to receive the full value of their rights and privileges as full blooded, natural born American citizens. A lot of the white devils didn’t see it quite that way.

Those diametrically opposed to giving black Americans any kind of break at all included, but were not limited to, self-identified conservatives, Republicans in general, Richard M. Nixon in particular, most Democrats, most self-identified liberals, and most of the average white devils in the street.

Political dissent in the form of protests against the Vietnam War had also reached critical levels as seen by Nixon and pretty much all of the above list of anti-black running dogs. Nixon and his gang of criminal associates came up with several very effective ways of isolating blacks and dissidents and neutralizing them as threats to the status quo. It all worked out well for the Nixon Gang.

The idea was to identify the undesired groups and demonize them; break up their power centers and get as many of them off the streets as possible; and render both groups incapable of organizing any trouble in the future. It was all surprisingly simple.

Blacks were identified with heroin, and hippies were identified with marijuana.  All college students and dissidents were identified as hippies. It was shouted from all of the rooftops that both substances were rampant in America and would destroy the entire country if allowed. Drugs, a vast laundry list of drugs, were criminalized to a degree that had never been seen before. After 1970, drug laws all over the country were made exponentially more severe. Punishments were like from outer space, they were numbers of years that exceeded sentences for violent crimes. One joint could get a college student seven years; ten grams of weed (one third of one ounce) became possession with intent to distribute, carrying a sentence of twenty years. Things like that. It was even worse for heroin. This was the beginning of the mass-incarceration that has by now made America the most imprisoned nation in the history of the world.

Yes, we have Tricky Dick to thank for all of that.

The Destruction of Education

It was decided by Nixon and the rest of the aforementioned idiots that education was primarily to blame for political dissent and anti-war protests. They became convinced that all of those hippies and draft dodgers had been radicalized by commie professors on various university campuses. So higher education itself became the enemy of the state.

This started a process where there have been fewer and fewer tenured professors and more and more gig-economy lecturers. Obtaining a university education has become more and more difficult for children of parents of limited means. Laws have been passed at all levels to make it harder for young Americans to get a good education. (Bankruptcy laws, and others.)

By now, access to a quality university education is a lost dream for a wide demographic of American students, and for many of those to make it through on borrowed funds the future is a dark vision of debt-slavery.  

What about primary and secondary education? They were gradually drawn into what became a war on education in general.

First came the standardized tests. As part of the anti-union fever of the Reagan years, it was suggested that virtually all schools and all teachers were underperforming. This was blamed on teachers’ unions. The solution offered was the implementation of a battery of standardized tests to measure the performance of one school against other schools, and one teacher against all other teachers. Money would be taken from “underperforming schools,” and diverted to “high-performing schools.” Quite intentionally, the underperforming schools were populated by minority children for whom English was often a second language that had not yet been mastered. Also intentionally, the high-performing schools were in prosperous white neighborhoods. Permission was sought to fire the union teachers struggling in already financially stressed underperforming schools.

Then came the charter schools, further enhancing the education of students from prosperous, white backgrounds and further degrading the education of students that may be from various minority or troubled backgrounds. The charter schools also divert huge sums of money to executives who may not even be education professionals and corporations and their shareholders. They also add to the creation of a larger class of non-union teachers, weakening the solidarity of teachers and reducing the power of teachers’ unions.

Our Allies in Los Angeles

This is the battle that the L.A.U.S.D. teachers are fighting. They are fighting it for all of us. They are struggling on behalf of the entire education system at the primary and secondary levels in every one of the United States.

Keep the money in the public schools; charter schools are tools of the devil; keep class sizes manageable, so that teachers can do their jobs properly and students don’t get lost in the fog towards the back of the room; put a nurse in every school. (I’ll let greater minds than mine grapple with the question of the need for school psychologists.) Listen to the teachers! They are professionals, and they are closer than anyone else to the problems.

Don’t listen to weird dilatants like Betsy DeVos or Bill Gates, who have agendas that vary from religious theocracy to unfathomable evil. There are many people involved in these discussions that believe that the population of America has gotten so large that it would be best to maintain a considerable portion of it in ignorance. Three hundred and thirty million people, and there are those whose boots shake at the idea of that many well informed voters.

It is worth remembering that the main purpose of the public school system from its inception through the middle of the 20^th Century was to take an extremely diverse student body and homogenize them into typical American citizens. The curriculum was standardized over the length and breadth of this country to turn students from every cultural background into American citizens who spoke the same cultural language and were prepared to work, and if necessary, fight, together for common cause.

Put me on record as believing that that public school system was a good idea.

P.S. I’m a union backer, too.  

Spin Easy Time!: A Modest Proposal To Reduce The Cost Of The Border...

Here's a post from March, 2017 that may help to break this log-jam over the border wall. Satire Alert! Do not take this post literally.

Spin Easy Time!: A Modest Proposal To Reduce The Cost Of The Border...: After months of wondering whether such a thing were even possible, it appears that Donald Trump is the President of the United States and t...

Local Rules

Anyone who goes to a new place must be aware that any little thing might be done very differently in that particular place. Let’s call it, “Local Rules.” Be cautious and pay attention for a while until you get the hang of it. That person’s behavior might be rude, or there might be a reason for it. Never assume that the rule on any subject is the same in the new location as it is back home. The penalties for insensitivity to local rules vary from you making a total ass of yourself to you getting your entire family killed in a twisted steel car wreck.

Manhattan Traffic

A simple example is Manhattan traffic. There are rules, and you had better learn them before you start trying to run lights or jump stop signs.

I should say “were,” because I don’t have a clue about the rules for driving in Manhattan these days. I haven’t driven in Manhattan since the mid-1980s. I had learned to drive in New York, but I had learned in Queens. My teacher was my cousin, nine years older than me, and he had a very good approach. “You’re going to be driving in traffic,” he said, “so you’re going to learn to drive in traffic.” He handed me the wheel immediately, and he directed me to the nearest transportation hub, which was Flushing, the terminus of the number 7 train and about half of the buses in Queens. It was also the destination of at least thirty percent of the car traffic in northern Queens on any given day. I already knew how to drive, way up on the sly, so I just went along.

My cousin had a motto, which was, “what man has done, man can do.”  It’s a good motto as mottoes go, and it does sum up how he felt about himself: if anybody else can do it, I can do it too. He was a pistol, my cousin. So immediately upon our arrival in Flushing he has me drive up Northern Boulevard. I was driving a 1962 Chevrolet Impala SS, belonging to my dad. As soon as he spotted a 1962 Chevy pulling out of a tight parking space, he told me stop! Park it here! If he got that one out, you can get this one in.  “What man has done, man can do.” I knew the basics of parallel parking, so I parked the car. Easy-Peasy. But Manhattan was a horse of a different color.

Later on, I became a taxi driver. It was the “warm body” job in New York at the time. If you weren’t dead and cold, you could drive cabs. If you wanted to make a living driving a cab, you had to go to Manhattan and stay there. That’s when I learned the conventions for driving in Manhattan.

It was very different than Queens, or anywhere else, for that matter. In Manhattan, there are Avenues that run north and south for many miles, and many Streets, “cross streets,” that run across Manhattan island from one side to the other. The Avenues are a big deal; the Streets not so much. There were many Local Rules to learn.

For instance, if you were going along with the flow of traffic downtown on an Avenue, let’s say, and you wanted to move to the right side of the Avenue to make a right turn, all you had to do was look straight out the window to your right. If there was not a car right there, straight in your line of vision, you could just change lanes to the right. No signal; no nothing; just go. You could assume that there was no one in your blind spot, because that would be stupid, and New Yorkers are anything but stupid. Every driver naturally arranged themselves into a pattern where no one was in anyone else’s blind spot. They all assumed that someone in the lane to their left who wanted to move to the right might just go for it. So, they hung back. It made sense. It was Local Rules. And it worked.

The visitors to the city who were not familiar with these rules could make a real mess. Remember, you’ve got to be careful until you figure out the Local Rules!

I drove cabs for a bit more than two years, nights, and I saw a lot of accidents. I was in a few, in fact. Mine were simple rear end, low impact, no injury accidents, which were the most typical accidents in Manhattan. Most of the traffic wasn’t going very fast, with the traffic jams and all, and most of us knew the rules. It was the out-of-towners who caused all of the death and destruction.

One of the rules was: if you are traveling north or south on an Avenue, and the traffic light ahead is a stale yellow, just hit the gas and run the light. If it turns red when you are fifty feet from the corner, go even faster. No one will be poking their head out of a side street, or starting to cross the street, just because the light was green for them. That would be stupid! See above: New Yorkers are not stupid.

Another rule was: never run a light like that on a side street. If you are going east or west on a Street, and approaching an Avenue, jam on those brakes, brother, because any car on the Avenue has the right of way to run that light. Over my couple of years, I had many opportunities to slowly pass big accidents late at night in Manhattan, and the bad ones were generally this kind of rule breaking, side street red light runners, and more often than not, the ones where I could read the license plates showed that the fools were mostly from New Jersey. I even saw one from Delaware. What were they thinking? I know, actually. They were thinking: what do these New Yorkers know that I don’t know? With a few drinks in me, I’m as good as any of ‘em! They can run lights, I’m running lights too! Thereupon they, and their families, died horribly.

Travel Tips

It is important to remember when traveling that you are not at home and your accustomed behavior may violate the Local Rules in the place that you are visiting. Remember, there is nothing special about the set of rules used where you live. Your rules do not travel with you. Your rules to not trump their rules.

The converse is also true: their local rules may violate the rules that you use back home. That’s okay too. Here’s an example.

I have been living in Thailand for ages now, and there is a custom among Thais that annoys several of my friends whenever they encounter it. I must admit that at first the custom kind of annoyed me as well. At least until I understood the reason for it.

In Thailand, like almost anywhere else, you will often see signs in a store window listing the hours that the store, or office, will be open. The sign might say, “Open Monday to Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.”  On most days you may visit the store or ride past and observe that it is open during those hours. Then one day, you wish to actually go to the office, let’s say it’s the office of the big cable TV provider in Thailand, and you arrive at the office at 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday, in my case after riding my bicycle for a hot, sweaty twenty minutes, and there is a sign on the locked door that says, “closed today.”  It’s a handwritten sign, in Thai, written in ball-point on a piece of paper torn out of a notebook. On that occasion, I found the situation very annoying. And that wasn’t the last time, or the most egregious circumstance.

This phenomenon began to make sense after I had had a couple of years to observe Thai people in work situations. The thing to remember about Thai culture is that people are more important than things, or money, or jobs. People come first. If you leave work in the middle of the day, or don’t show up for work at all, because a family member urgently needs your assistance, everyone understands immediately. Of course, you need to go! Your baby needs a doctor’s attention! You should be there! I then understood that the cable TV office was closed that day because the woman who manned the counter was needed elsewhere for family reasons. Her mother probably called her and said, “honey, get over here quick, I just damn near cut my hand off with a machete.”  In Thailand you do not need to contact your boss and ask permission when this happens. You just go, and bring the boss up to speed later on. Shops and small restaurants can be closed for days at a time for reasons like these. These are the Local Rules, and usually it all works out fine. Those cable bills will be paid, in a day or two. No effect on revenue at all! People come first.  

Isn’t that a great idea? To put people before mere things? I have always thought so. I was also pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the entirety of Thai culture is built upon the idea that everything works better when the greatest number of people are happy, or at least contented with the decision being considered. Always consider the equilibrium of the group when making personal decisions. The happiness of the group is of greater importance than the advantage of one individual. I thought, how wonderful! That’s how I feel about it!

I would not say that Thailand is perfect. No place on earth is perfect. I will say that most of the Local Rules in Thailand are designed to create the greatest possible harmony among the greatest possible number of people.

I can support that message.

The Shinya Minute

Shinya Kimura builds these things by hand. Every one is different. I don't think that he builds anything to order, and for all I know he doesn't 'sell any of them either. He gets ideas, and he builds the bikes. 

How about this one? Isn't it a beauty? Ever seen one just like it? 

I doubt it. This fellow is an artist.