Prius Dementat

Briefly noted during a foray into the drive-time news - the now-inevitable GOP Dauphin Mitt Romney saying

"For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job ... for grandparents who can't afford the gas to visit their grandchildren ... for the mom and dad who never thought they'd be on food stamps ... for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month — to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I've met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight."

and bitterly observed, to the solitude of the dashboard radio;

"And in that "better America" the policies you support - every act of your Party to date - every small-town, back-bench, mean-minded, spiteful Teabagger swill you've ingested and now claim you'll swill out to the nation if elected - will ensure that her second job will pay less for longer hours, that their gas will be exhausted more quickly and profit it's producers more richly, that those food stamps will be harder to come by and more desperately needed, that the small business will be more likely to be battered and beaten, sold, gutted, and re-sold by your crony-capitalist friends' megacorporation, and that all those good and decent Americans will be further crammed down, shat upon, disenfranchised, wage-slaved to the wealthy and connected who are your primary supporters and beneficiaries"

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, how huge a lie does this man, and this Party, have to tell before the American public screams "Hold! Enough!"?

And I'm afraid that we all know the answer, my friends.

There IS no lie huge enough, for the vast Gadarene herd that still gobbles up this swill.

We cannot continue in this fashion without destruction. We Are SO Fucked.

Or, as one might say in Latin, were one philosophically so inclined;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam

Primum non Nocere

I wrote the other day about how tiring it was looking around at the seemingly bottomless ocean of venal and stupid that is much of my country at the moment.

Here's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, and why it's so frustrating, courtesy of Fred Clarke at slacktivist;

"Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, discussing the free-rider problem created by the millions of uninsured, spoke of “...the social norms that allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”

Scalia responded, “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?”

Justice Scalia’s remark there isn’t addressing the Affordable Care Act or its constitutionality. He is addressing an earlier law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986. That’s the law encoding the “social norm” Verrilli mentions — the law that requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone in need regardless of their ability to pay.

Scalia’s suggestion was that this law be dismissed. Or perhaps just disregarded because, eh, it’s just a law, so whatever. He did not try to say that it was unconstitutional — it clearly is not. He was simply suggesting that he finds it inconvenient and thus that we, the people, ought not to have written into law a social norm that runs counter to the social Darwinism he seems to prefer."

Now I'm willing to accept that there's an argument to be made for and against the notion of how sick and injured people's care can and should be paid for.

What I can't accept is the argument for just NOT caring for these sick and injured people at all.

That's...beyond callous. Clarke calls it stupid, idiotic.

But I'd call it worse. I'd call it insane.

And suicidial.

Let me explain why, and use an analogy I know pretty well.You all probably know that I was a medic in the U.S. Army. I am proud of that, proud that the guys I served with called me "doc" and seemed happy to see me roll up with my bag of health care. I liked that I was their country doctor and was asked for medical advice on everything from head lice to erectile dysfunction (and I had a hell of a time with that one, I can tell you...)

But, here's the thing.

Why should an army bother with medics?

I mean, a wounded soldier is useless. He or she can't fight, they can't work. Even worse - they suck up valuable resources away from combat power. Another soldier has to stop fighting and care for them. Other soldiers have to carry them - often requiring an expensive vehicle or aircraft and all its logisitical tail - back to where another soldier - a highly paid surgeon - can treat them.

And there's worse!

Then a fully staffed hospital must be organized to care for this useless soldier. Nurses and medics for daily care, doctors, therapists. If the soldier is so badly injured that he or she cannot return to duty - and let's not be all swoony, the whole point of a hell of a lot of this medical care is to get that trooper back to work; the motto of the Army's Medical Corps is "To Conserve the Fighting Strength" and don't you forget it - the Army still doesn't stop wasting time, money, and people on them.They are shipped back to a CONUS medical center where they are taught to live as best they can. Often it's not great, but compared to the injured soldiers in earlier wars the U.S. trooper has a pretty damn good deal.

Starting with all those expensive medics.

Why? Why the hell would any sensible military organization waste all this stuff?

Okay, you know the answer and so do I; it's part of the contract.

One way armies get soldiers to fight - smart armies, armies that understand how people think - is to make sure those soldiers understand the Deal. You fight for me, I'll take care of you when you get hurt.

Which is why, by the way, that old soldiers like me tend to scream at the VA when it fucks up, or at other people or politicians when they fuck with the VA. Because they're trying to renege on the Deal. And that's why, for all that it probably drives them crazy, none of our deficit-"hawk" politicians is willing to go all budget-cutty on things like medical treatment for wounded soldiers. They know their ridiculous expeditionary wars in central Asia are not popular - imagine just how not-popular they'd become if messed-up GIs started falling all over the sidewalk?

But these jokers, both the professional funnymen like Tony Scales and the non-made guys like zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan (thanks, Charlie), don't seem to understand that societies have a very similar dynamic down underneath.

Once we moved along from the Hobbesean world of pure tribalism - and even most tribes works on the basis that you care for your helpless young, old, and sick - we developed a sort of Deal; the stinky common people worked their asses off, and in return the nobility went easy on them from time to time.

This has taken a hell of a lot of different forms throughout the centuries, from largesse, panem et circensus to Henry Ford paying his rivetheads three bucks an hour.

It isn't a giveaway. It isn't charity. It's part of The Deal, and when the people on top, the people like Scalia, forget that, things can go to hell in a hurry;

"We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison’s wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen’s voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim’s head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike."

The U.S. Army isn't a perfect organization by any means, and it, like any other big corporation, can do some damn dumb things when it tries.

But it is also charged with doing one of the most damn deadly difficult things ever invented - fighting wars. And in doing so has learned that some things just don't make any sense at all, and screwing around with the privates, and leaving them to die when they get sick, or hurt, is the quickest way to break the damn Deal. And that when the little people are finally, throughly convinced that you are willing to let them fucking die before lifting a finger or spending a nickel to do something, well, they tend to figure they have nothing to lose, and from there the discussion usually deteriorates. Into something less pleasant.

Putting heads on pikes and such.

So I'm not sure if Scalia and his intellectual siderunners are, as Clarke believes, stupid, or just, like the Princesse de Lamballe, greedy and shortsighted. Or like I suspect, all the above and to the extent that it makes them functionally suicidal; if they got what they wanted they'd put us on a path that would make a real revolution, a genuine, bloody, civil explosion, not just inevitable but necessary.

But whatever there reason, their hearts or their shoes, the effect seems to be the same; a longing for a world where people don't act like people - who can be tossed out to croak and won't destroy their society if it shows it doesn't care about them.

I honestly have no idea how this nonsense will end. But if it ends, as at least one prominent conservative seems to think it should, with the poor bleeding out at the door to the emergency room, well, then...

...how fucking stupid and suicidal would that be?

Sigh.

Like I said; the damn ocean of stupid just seems to go on forever.

To the Mountains of Madness

The Germans used to tell a story about the occupation of Alsace, back in the late Eighteen-hundreds.Now the local Alsatians, part-German though they were, liked having a bunch of foreign soldiers living on top of them about as much as you'd think. And the soldiers probably didn't like it any better, being young, bored, and far from home amid a population that didn't much care for them.

And, unfortunately, some of them might not have behaved as they would have back in those homes. So come the day an Alsatian father, bolder or perhaps just more reckless than the rest, drags his shrinking daughter into the German commandant's office to rage about the goddamn soldier who had raped his sweet, demure, virginal little girl.Now I'll bet that Hauptmann probably looked at the bedraggled little Franconian farm wench and thought "Was im ficknamen haben Wir hier jetzt..?" I'll bet he vaguely remembered her hanging around the garrison, possibly even flirting with the junge in their natty uniforms. A trooper with a steady job, even a foreigner, might not have seemed like a bad catch for an ambitious girl from a boring little scheißloch farm town.

And I'll bet he sighed, thinking that he really needed this like a case of the piles; some goddamn troop that couldn't keep it in his pants until he visited Mdme. Villebois down at the town brothel, and some little local wench who was probably more pissed off about the lack of an engagement ring than the actual ravishing.

And about how impossible it would be to try and figure out which one of his guys had actually done the damn deed.I can picture him drumming his fingers on the desk in irritation before shouting for his Stabsfeldwebel.

And I'll bet the Stabs had his guesses; if he was any good he'd know who had been on the prowl for the farmgirls in town. But he had a couple of hundred men, and the nights were dark, and the lanes were shadowy, and who the hell knew, anyway?

But whatever had happened, the two soldiers knew this; there would be hell to pay if they didn't do something.

The locals were quiet because they knew that to raise their hand against the occupation was to get crushed. And because the troops were usually reasonably polite, and didn't get in people's way without reason.

But...if this got around, and suddenly the local people began to think that their women, or anyone else, might be attacked, well...the officer and the sergeant both knew how many of the locals had been armed by the French government back in the last war...and how many of them probably had a Chassepot shoved up in the eaves somewhere. And they probably grimaced uneasily, remembering the damn franc-tireurs - the "free shooters" - who had made the countryside so unpleasant for them on the way to Paris a couple of years ago.

So the Stabs paraded the garrison, and the Hauptmann addressed them quietly, and the men drew lots out of a helmet. And the unlucky winner was marched out the following morning to the wall outside, neatly shot, and buried in the churchyard that evening. Personally, the Stabs suspected that Kirchen probably hadn't done it - Kirchen was a shy kid, really, and he suspected Knabe, the dirty hound; he'd been sniffing around that girl for the past week.

And with the weary rue old soldiers feel when they think about the things they're told to do or asked to do by the feckless people they work for the first shirt probably regretted having to shoot one of his own for a damn cheap little tart who'd likely be fat and blowsy by forty, married to some local yokel with mud up his backside, who both in five years would have forgotten all about the damn business.

How a good man had been killed because of someone's damn stupidity. About the fucking waste and misery and pointlessness of it all.

And how the Stabs would shoot another man just as quickly if it happened again.

Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.

One soldier had died as soldiers have always died; to save his friends, and to serve his country's purpose.I have no doubt that the sergeant that killed a slew of Afghans this past week was off his nut. Shell-shocked, battle-fatigued, PTSD'd...call it whatever you want. The man was on his, what, fourth? combat tour in probably six or seven years. That's a hell of a lot of time for a young man to spend doing the dirty work of imperial policing in some of the shittier parts of the world.And, honestly - I don't think that his insane slaughter says anything of any value about the "Afghanistan mission", or whatever the sweet hell the U.S. Army was doing in that town, or the province, or in A-stan, or southwest Asia, for that matter. It's just a tale told by semiautomatic fire, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. To take this tale of one man's journey into the mountains of madness is madness itself, trying to read the scribblings of a soul tormented to insanity by the peering in the abyss for too long.What tells me something very sad and sorry, though, is the general reaction I'm hearing and reading here in the U.S.

Which varies between much speculation about the very things this horror means nothing about - the Great Game that sergeant's country and mine is playing in the Afghan highlands, the "mission" he was supposed to be there for, or anything else having to do with the larger whys and wherefores that the United States has spent more than a decade farkling about doing in the hinterlands of central Asia - and personal hand-wringing about the trooper who seems to have gone bloodily nuts on the night of 11 MAR.

There are troubling, difficult problems there, there are difficult questions to ask about all of those things, but this particular incident touches on none of them.

Instead, what it drives home to me is how utterly, completely cluelessly disengaged the entire U.S. - from the public through the civilians in the federal government to the U.S. Army - is to whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there.Because the Hauptmann and the Stabsfeldwebel could tell everyone involved what needs to happen now.

Because if whatever the fiddle-fuck we're doing there means anything that soldier - regardless of how tortured his mind is, regardless of the demands of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, regardless of his rights, or the opinions of the gormless American public - needs to have a quick drumhead court-martial there at his post, be given a kind word and a good meal, and then taken out to the wall outside the FOB and shot.Because the important thing is that the village remained quiet.We just don't seem to get it.

Imperial occupations are damn deadly difficult things. They don't have a fucking thing to do with Goodness, or Rightness, or Freedom, or whatever bullshit pablum gets fed to the ignorant masses. They're about figuring out how to keep the locals quiet and as happy as possible.

Anything that makes that happen is what needs to happen.

And if you can't live with that - you need to get the fuck out of the business of imperial wars.Because we seem to have chosen to treat this like we'd treat a domestic murder rampage. Which makes perfect sense - because it was a murder rampage - except that in the context in which it happened is utterly mad. Other good men will die because of it.

Because people here and our media keep repeating that this man's madness says nothing about the tens of thousands of other GIs in the country that, while perfectly true, is perfectly meaninglessly mad.

Because while talking about combat stress, and giving this trooper his Article 31 rights, and a fair court-martial, and a long sentence in a military prison makes perfect sense to the world of the United States and the people comfortably here, or in their offices in Kabul, or in the quiet briefing rooms alongside the Potomac, in terms of what it will mean in the mountains of Afghanistan... ...is a perfect wilderness of madness.

Nutjob Rules

OK, so enough with the garment-rending. Time to get back to the wider world.

Oh - first, a question for the readership; this months' battle is either going to be the Reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936) or the Battle of Adowa (1896). I'm leaning towards the latter just because it's more interesting and less known. But in pure "decisiveness" terms the Rhineland was the more critical event. Any strong feelings one way or the other?And this morning I was scanning through the news and one thought kept sticking in my head; why does it seem that my country seems to be stuck on the notion that the world "should be" something other than it is?

One example is this year's ridiculous presidential campaign, which - in the middle of some truly spectacular economic and geopolitical fuckups - seems to be mainly about what women do or don't do with their genitals.

WTF?

One of the other examples is summed up in my friends jim and Lisa's post about the recent "Koran burning" controversy. Their money graf is:

"The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is not about liberal democratic values and has nothing to do with the welfare of the Afghan people. The entire philosophy of Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 was based upon a simulacrum of truth, and the burning (as with previously reported incidents of Koran desecration) proves the point to the citizens of Afghanistan."

Which is absolutely true.

But IMO the greater point is; we knew that the central Asian plateau was chock full o' religious nuts when we went in there. We had a ringside seat for Charlie Wilson's War, watching the Soviets try to turn the Afghan Allah-pesterers into good little Young Pioneers and failing bloodily.

Why the hell - why the HELL - would we think otherwise?Here's my opinion; it's because we as a people, we as a polity, are eaten up from head to toe with magical thinking. We believe wholeheartedly that if we just WANT it bad enough that the world will be what we want it to be. That we have the Awesome Yankee Doodle Dandy Power that will make Afghans become suburban Maryland Presbyterians, make piles of corporate money do something other than turn our electoral process into a pimp-and-ho show, make individuals and corporations act prudently, sensibly, and responsibly...in other words, make the world into a rational and sensible place rather than the monstrous concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision we should know by now that it is.

And, specifically, in Afghanistan we the U.S. chose to go into the religious nuthouse and play with the religious nuts. Inside Chock Full o' Nuts you either play by the Nutjob Rules, you lose, or you don't play. All the power and money in the world won't change that, because you're dealing with religious nuts; they don't care about power and money - they're doing what they truly deeply believe their Invisible Sky Daddy wants.Their magical thinking is always going to be stronger than your magical thinking. It's really that simple.

Why is that so difficult to understand?

It seems that it is.

Evergreen

My neighbors to the north just declared the shocking fact that boys who like boys like to get married to boys and girls who like girls like to get married to girls and that's pretty much okay with them.

Now I understand that the "conservative" enemies of all things not-heterosexual are declaring that they will "refer" this new law to the ballot in November so the homo-hatin' good people of Washington state can hate them on some homos and save the precious institution of marriage for other good people like the Kardashians.

Or something.

And then the people who want to get married will file a lawsuit. And then the entire damn thing will get played out in court. Over and over, all the way up to the Supreme Court, I assume, who will probably in the sort of steal-bread-and-sleep-under-bridges wisdom they are famed for will decide they don't know what the good people of Washington should do but that homos eating wedding cake is icky.

Well, fuck.

Is there a point where we can stop going through this ridiculous kabuki? I mean, pretty much every constitution from the federal on down says "you don't get to pick legal rights based on X" where X includes race, religion, hat size, etc.So the eventual defense for these sorts of lets-write-our-bigotry-into-law always seems to come down to "ooooh, icky!" (Dahlia Lithwick sums up the particular version used in the defense of CA Prop.8 nicely here)

The Supremes will continue to tap dance around this so long as the SCOTUS reactionaries draw breath, but eventually somebody will have to accept that the constitutions say what they say, and that if you extend the legal right to co-sign a loan to the hets you gotta do the same thing for the gays and pretty much everyone else of legal age. How freaking hard is that?That civil and criminal law, that government-provided penalties and services shouldn't be based on what you think is icky but merely what serves the people of the United States, and the various states, best, and that a legal contract - and let's just call it "marriage" because, well, that's what it is - is a legal contract, regardless of how squicky the things that the co-signers do in bed makes you feel.

It won't mean that the Catholic Church, or any other church that hates them on some icky homos, will have to marry them.Just that a church that doesn't, can, and the scrap of paper they will get will carry the full faith and credit of the issuing authority and let them do all the things that any other couple can; spend stupid money on crap they don't need, have screaming fights that piss off the neighbors and frighten the cat, raise a loving family, get old together, and end up broke in a rundown retirement home changing each others' adult diapers.

So in effect the only real, long-term result of this ridiculous bullshit waste of time is that a lot of gay people will have to ride in the back of the bus for many years.And how effed up is that?

"Homophobic and Stupid is No Way To Go Through Life, Son"

I got a big laugh from this, the latest on the proposed re-institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (aka "Youse Homos Can Serve Until We SAY Youse Can't Serve") from Former Senator "Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum:

"What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. That's tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if rick santorum was president. That policy would be reinstituted as far as people in I would not throw them out that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual."

because if you needed to know anything about what the man doesn't know about military service circa 2011, this pretty much tells you.And that's...pretty much everything.

I never served in anything but an all-male unit until after I got off active duty. But since then I've been assigned to everything between a headquarters company and a laundry-and-bath platoon with stops along the way with every sort of military critter.

And one thing I can tell you with stone-cold certainty.

Sex is ALWAYS an issue.

Doesn't matter if it's the boys on the girls, the girls on the boys, the boys on the boys or the girls on the girls. We're human, so until we're about 68 years old roughly a third of our brain is occupied in thinking about sex. I'm not sure what the other 66 percent does; sudoku, maybe.

Obviously the most complicated is in mixed-gender units. I've worked in several, and I can tell you that you can walk and talk military discipline and the UCMJ all you want to, but you get a young man and a young woman together and you automatically have the potential for something not covered in the rest positions at the halt section of FM 22-5.

Mind you, the Army has a long history of being stupid about Sex. I saw it first all the way back in 1981, when in its infinite wisdom the Army had set up a mixed-gender BT company. 1st Platoon of A/4/3, Fort Dix N.J. was female. "First Fox" fireguards shared a stairwell with my Second Platoon, and I am told (though I was unaware at the time, being first a squad leader and then platoon guide and thus exempt from fireguard) that the young women on guard ranged from adorable to fugly and the young men from studly to dorky. But almost none of them left Fort Dix unscrewed. It's lucky we never did have a fire; the horndogs were too busy having it off in the empty cadre rooms to have sounded an alarm.And in my experience it almost always has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes Santorum's connection between the Big Gay Scary even less sensible. The disciplinary problems and/or personnel complications were 99.9% heterosexual and 85% consensual (the other 15% were a supervisor/supervised deal, which IMO pretty much can't really be counted as such any more than any other "sexual harassment" type scenerio can).

And gay?

Ask anyone who served in Panama back in '86 and '87; the women's barracks over at 210 Aviation was like a big OG-107-covered episode of "The L-Word". Damn near every one of those gals liked her girls like she liked her corn-on-the-cob; hot and covered in butter.

But y'know what? They worked their asses off and kept those aircraft where they belonged, in the air, and as a result nobody really brought up the whole "hot-girl-on-girl-GI-action" thing.So excuse me if I continue to laugh at young Mister Santorum, who seems to think that U.S. troops have to put their genitalia in the company safe before leaving Reception Station. Sex not an issue?

Maybe on your planet, spaceman...

Hot for Teacher II: Hakkaa päälle

I usually run from op-ed pieces recommending "solutions" to the "education problem" like a vampire from sunlight or a priest from a pedophilia investigation, but this article was inescapable, being as it was on the front page (above the fold) of the opinion section of my local paper.The idea that there's a hidden key somewhere (typically Finland) that will unlock the education door and make American schools something more like the shiny, happy ideals we see in Heritage Foundation fliers and pedagogical conference brochures seems almost unkillable. Somehow our nation always seems to be At Risk; at risk of failing, at risk of falling behind those regimented Europeans and cunning Asians unless we do X. Y. and Z, at risk of economic and intellectual desuetude unless we Do Something Brilliant Now.

What's the latest flavor of brilliance?

Apparently it resides in Finland. That's where they train only the "best" students to be teachers. This is our authors' notion, while they recommend somehow magically ensuring that the number of teachers trained matches the teaching jobs available to avoid the current oversupply of discouraged teachers. Let's pay them handsomely, too, finding all those tax dollars' special secret place where the voters have hidden them, and with it we'll also somehow make all schools safe, intellectually challenging places to work. Oh, yeah, then we'll find even more money to evaluate and mentor these outstanding teachers thoroughly, and finally we'll make word "teacher" the semantic and social equivalent of "investment banker" or "major league baseball benchwarmer" resulting in all sorts of public love and respect for teachers.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, nothing, of course. If teaching were like trial law, biomedical research, or writing computer code. You'd jack the pay scale, jigger the working conditions a tittle, and the Stanford and Cornell grads would come shouting in.But teaching is nothing like these sorts of technical professions. Teaching is, fundamentally, a mixture of performance art and artisanal craft with technical knowledge thrown in on top. It is almost entirely personal, and the ability to teach well is highly reliant on the quick development of people skills.

And, what's more, as a teacher you're working with the Great Unwashed, the Average American; many of them will come to your classroom raised on television and video games, short of attention, patience, and ingenuity, trained to expect learning to be "fun", often poorly literate and numerate, impatient with being told that their "effort" is inconsequential and that they will not be rewarded for mediocrity.

I know, because I went from being a professional scientist to a teacher and back again.

As a registered geologist I was presented with a suite of challenging and often innovative tasks to solve in company with other professionals whom I respected and who listened to me with respect. I worked closely with my peers, my supervisors, and the clients, who acknowledged me as the subject matter expert that they were paying well for an opinion. I was able to maintain a stable family life and a fulfilling work life.

As a teacher I spent the vast majority of my day with adolescents who typically considered me an mildly entertaining irrelevance at best and an irritating nuisance at worst. I barely saw my peers and my supervisors were almost invisible. My workday consisted of attempting to introduce the most fundamental aspects of my profession to an audience that generally considered the subject (when they considered it at all) an obstacle to their social lives. I had to spend a hell of a lot of my time dealing with personal issues of people whose lives had been utterly fucked up for years prior to my encounter with them. For which time I was paid roughly half of what I made previously.

I did teach some great students, and agree that with good students teaching is among the most rewarding of tasks. But I also spent a ton of time on "classroom management" - in a setting with gave me a tenth of the tools I had had as a drill sergeant while expecting me to accomplish twice the instruction.

And possibly the worst part was the parents; many of whom didn't care or didn't know what their children were doing. many of whom were manifestly overwhelmed by their children, almost all of whom were struggling desperately under loads of work, family, debt, and a crippling lack of time and intellectual resource.

So the notion that somehow we can just wave a magic policy/money wand and make every public school Saddle River Country Day School?

Well...I think the key here is to look at the examples used in the article.

Finland
South Korea
Singapore

All of them relatively tiny, homogeneous, intensely urbanized and highly urbane polities, typically with cultures that emphasize unity, conformity, hard work and achievement. You might as well start making plans for American public schools in urban Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles by looking at the systems currently working so well in Grosse Pointe, Scarsdale, and Beverly Hills.

Of course the educational systems in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea work well.Given the starting points, you'd have to be a thermonuclear-grade moron to fuck them up. I'm just guessing here, but I highly suspect that it has as much to do with the qualities of the Finns, Singaporeans, and South Koreans in the classroms as it does with picking teachers from the top 25% of the ACT and putting scented piss-pucks in the boys bathrooms.

(True fact: the boys bathrooms in the high school I taught in stank like year-old piss. One of my classes started with the idea of raising money to put those disk-shaped odor absorbers in the urinals to help make the bogs a little less nasty, assuming that the lack of pucks was a budget problem. We were informed that, no, the practice had been intentionally halted because of the number of times the pucks had been stuffed into toilets and plugged them up.

Think about that for a moment; what sort of human fishes in a public urinal for a piss-soaked disk to then shove into a public toilet.

Hmmmm.)

Okay, here's the real bottom line.

In 1965 the Coleman Report identified economic class as the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement.

That conclusion has never been refuted.

If you take a look at "failing" schools identified by the NCLB, most of them are in urban or rural poor areas. It's the same here in Portland; our "good" schools are in the parts of town that look like Finland or Scarsdale (wealthy, white) - Grant, Lincoln, Wilson. The marginal ones - Madison, Franklin, Cleveland - are in the browner, more marginal parts of town. The "failing" ones - Roosevelt here in our NoPo and Jefferson - are in the hood, either Hispanic as up here or black in the case of Jefferson. This despite a PPS policy that has been in place for years to encourage the better teachers to choose the tougher schools.They don't - no one would. Because an American classroom in a tough neighborhood is never going to look like Singapore. Or Sweden. Or fucking Finland.

In fact, I'm going to now suggest a goddamn federal law banning on any educational nostrums, prescriptions, seminars, or on-line classes that mention the fucking word "Finland". Or "Singapore". You want to suggest a fix for education? Take something more like us or go to jail, dammit.

I suggest Brazil, maybe.

And this "education problem" isn't going away any other way, either. Income disparity in the U.S. is rising, and the percentage of people falling behind is growing, at a rate we haven't seen since the end of WW2. And the current political climate makes the notion of raising tax money to help the schools where the new underclasses will be warehoused somewhere south of unlikely and a quarter to "ain't ever gonna happen".

So, sorry, boys. I agree we can do better with our schools - though I will argue that they're not as bad as they're made to be, given the available cash and the human timber we're starting with. I won't argue that there needs to be better teacher training, testing, and mentoring, either.But it doesn't have as much to do with finding the academic superstars as it does the great actors, improvisational standups, skilled craftsmen, and savants. I can teach math to a great teacher - I can't teach a great mathematician how to teach.

And let's face it - there's no way in hell the teacher training schools will cut back their numbers and the American public ain't gonna vote the money you'd need for all this stuff, anyway. Your little piece was a nice dream. But it was a dream.

And dreaming of Finland isn't going to solve our problems. Hell, dreaming of Finland isn't even going to lead you to the right problems.

Down From The Hills

Got back late last night from three days of exploratory drilling in the high valleys in the north side of the Olympic National Park. The Elwha Valley, to be exact.So for the three days of the 2010 election my day consisted of rising before the sun, eating a rather disappointing breakfast at the Super 8 Motel, driving up into the tributary valleys of the Elwha River, working until sunset, driving down into Port Angeles, finding food and eating it, bathing, and a moment or two of reading before sleep knocked me down like a runaway trolley car.

I was asleep by nine every night.The work was satisfying, though, and the setting was spectacular. In case you've never seen them, the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula have been crafted by artists or photographers to be perfectly spectacular, mountainous-looking mountains. They are like the Platonic ideal of mountains, the sort of improbably sheer, improbably cragged, improbably massive-looking peaks you see in paintings in every cheap motel room.Well, except for the Super 8 Motel; there are no paintings in a Super 8 Motel. The coffee kinda sucks, too.

One intriguing thing about our work area was how deep it was in the canyon. We had glorious sunny weather the last two days, and both days we watched the terminator glide down the mountainside behind us as the corona brightened atop the ridge across the river. The light crept down, the glow over the treetops increased, until at about 12:15 the sun lifted over the crest.

And set at 12:35.I'm serious - I think we had about fifteen to twenty minutes of direct sunlight both days. It's a wonder that anything grows in that dark canyon but moss and fungi.

But it did, and the canyon was lush with the wet fecundity of the Northwest. This included the passersby, who were, mostly, locals heading up to the hot spring. Although the Park Service did their best to make this caldera sound unappetizing (mentioning especially the bacteria, which made me think of yeasty sorts of things infesting the unlucky bather's organs of generation...) the traffic was light but steady.The contractor we were working with mentioned that apparently clothing was typically not an option there at the spring, delivering this detail in salacious tones, but the prospective nude frolickers I met all seemed to be resoundingly unerotic. Nothing frightening, just the antithesis of the sort of rapacious voluptuousness Twenty-first Century America considers "sexy", figures that promised a sort of outdoor sturdiness combined with the small things that separate a woman who uses her body for work and play rather than gets work from the look of her body; roughened skin in the used places like the palms of hands and soles of feet. Thickened wrists, small scars or similar pain-marks left by a mishandled tool or an unseen file drawer. Hair untended other than by washing and drying.

Perfectly attractive women, just not the sort of improbably pneumatic naiad to drive men mad with lust at the sight of them crouching naked in a hot pool talking about the copier problems at work.I did my work, packed up and drove the four hours back to Portland to find that the country has, apparently, had a temper tantrum and decided that since it can't have everything it wants for nothing it will try putting the biggest idiots it can find in positions of power and see how well that works out.

I can just imagine, but not surprisingly Ed at "ginandtacos" already imagined it and better than I ever could (tho the italics are mine):

"As our entire political culture is built on the foundational idea that no one has to live with the consequences of their own actions, that means that Option #1 (the new teatards actually do "cut government spending", i.e. rip the pork teat out of the mouths of the local districts) is about as likely as a Pittsburgh Pirates World Series appearance in 2011. Option #2 (the Tea Crackers discover that, while "government spending is Very, Very BAD, "government spending" for THEM is...ummm...not so bad), of course, means that absolutely nothing will change. The giant freshman class of Republicans – an unsightly parade of the lame, the halt, and the ugly – will very quickly fall in line with the norms of the institution, trying their damnedest to secure their own re-election by redirecting as much of everyone else's tax dollars to his or her district as possible."

This situation seems to have been somewhat moderated here in Oregon, where most of our Dems held their seats and, best of all, the ridiculous gubernatorial bid of former Blazers basketball guard Chris Dudley (was he a guard? Guards seems to have a reputation for thinking of stuff, plays, maybe. Whatever.) was barely foiled in order to return to the Mahonia Mansion former Governor Kitzhaber, who basically staged a sit-down strike the LAST time we ran out of money, back in the Nineties, refusing to sign the idiotic bills the Republican legislature sent him.

He's not exactly electrifying and he has no idea what to do, either, with a state that can't run a deficit, doesn't (yet) want to become Zaire complete with poisonous food, toxic air and water, and yet refuses to tax itself. Or even eighty-six the fucking moronic "kicker" law. He's been elected to be the monkey wrangler on a Monkey Island where every goddam monkey thinks nobody else should get to fling poop but him or her but that he or she should be able to fling their poop without regards for safety, common sense, public weal, scenic value, or anything at all other than their own fucking amusement.

It's an impossible job and I wouldn't take it you paid me in gold and virgins.Mind you, the state I had just left had given itself a knee square in its own balls; refusing to tax even its wealthiest plutocrats AND instated the idiotic 2/3rds "supermajority" rule to prevent their legislature from raising taxes on their own, either. The goal there seems to be to prove that Californians are not the only people who can fuck up an entire state within a generation. We had one of those supermajority rules, too, chumps - it worked about as well as you'd expect. Good luck with that, but I'll bet you'll end up being sorry.

So in the main we're still fucked, and we've now chosen to select some of the most gonzo fuckers from amongst us to lead us. This is the sort of logic that leads men to try and use electric meat grinders for self-pleasure. It cannot and will not end well, whilst the blood and screaming produced by the process will be extremely distressing.Damn. I guess it really is impossible to lose money betting on the stupidity of the American public.

Ladybug Girl

I retract or reconsider absolutely nothing of the preceding post.

But.

For all that I would no more want her near the levers of power than I would want to arm a wild monkey with a speargun, I have to say three things about the sordid tale of wankistic frat-boy canoodling that is being used to humiliate Christine O'Donnell.1. Instead of making me sneer at her or laugh at her, this story actually makes like the woman more as a person. Mind you, when I hear or read the things she says on the campaign trail I'm reminded all over again that she is a smug, entitled, ignorant jackass and can go back to hoping she gets her electoral butt whipped. But to get high-schooled, and make out with some egotistical dick, but still manage to stick to your chaste principles? You get some props for that, girl.

2. Something that jumped out of the guy's story is this little gem:

"But there were signs that she wasn't very experienced sexually. When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest."

Important safety tip, Romeo; real women have body hair, and body hair means pubic hair. It's feminine, it's attractive, you might even say it's one of the defining aspects of "woman" as opposed to "girl". If you find a woman who looks sexually like a woman and not a prepubescent girl "a big turnoff" I have to say that I'm surprised you aren't spending your weekends at the State Correctional Facility for Men for statutory rape. You might find that unlike your fastidious frat-boy ass your jail husband there might not have trouble with your furry man bits.

Just sayin'...

3. Why is it that a woman looks completely silly and adorable in a ladybug costume?It has to be a XX thing. A man in a similar getup would look utterly idiotic. Chris O'Donnel was Ladybug Girl before there was a Ladybug Girl. Who knew. She looks winsomely dorky in her bug suit.

I still wouldn't vote for her

Teed Off

So here's what's so frustrating.

You all know we're coming up to the midterm elections.

And you also probably know that the overarching theme for this year is the Great GOP Resurgence.And that the newest standard bearers for the elephants are the "Tea Party" candidates, from Sharron Angle in Nevada to Chris O'Donnell in Delaware (and that's just the women) the news outlets are relentlessly flogging the notion that in a week we will be introduced to the "new generation" of Republicans; just as intransigent on fighting brown furriners (whether of the Scary Islamic Variety or the Operating The Leaf Blower For Your Landscaper Illegal Beaner Variety) and handing out tax breaks to the two-yacht family, this crew is even more enthusiastic for stuff even the former conservative nutjobs considered whacko; deregulating everything in sight, eliminating entire federal agencies - the ones they don't like, of course, mostly the ones that help brown furriners and immigrants an' stuff like agreeing with Global Warming (never Good, Nice agencies like Defense and the NSA, of course).Now, mind you, I have to say that most of this stuff sounds like the same crap we were being spoonfed back in the Gingrich Days (back when the ol' serial philanderer and moral savant was still considered a Power Broker) and were told then, as now, that it was a rich, chocolaty nutrient that would make us grow up bigger and stronger.

It didn't happen then, unless you were in the land of the stratospherically wealthy, and you'll excuse me if I don't believe it's going to happen now, either.

But let's give the devils their due, OK?

Let's assume that November 6th the nation wakes up with a new conservative majority in the Congress. Let's further assume that the rest of the government, and the nation as a whole, is so intimidated by the Tea Crackery Goodness of their new conservative masters that the incoming camorra manages to enact their entire agenda. Every bit of it. Every scrap, smidget, iota, jot, and tittle.Then what?

Gone are the Departments of Interior, Education, Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, National Public Radio, and the freaking Job Corps for all I know. The wealthy are unbound - the estate tax is gone, the entire nation pays a flat tax of, say, 10%. The poor and the old...well, they're on their own. You can choose to house your aged grannie in your basement or let the old harridan forage for food in the bins behind the Safeway with the rest of the old feebs.Your library? Privatized. Your heat, power, water; you pay their "market" price for them or you get cold and dirty. Your internet? Hey, haven’t you heard – the Internet is for porn, Jack. So you sign up for Saucy Suzie’s Dirty DSL most quick smart or it's no more "Ranger Against War" for you. Get sick? Better be employed, Giocomo. You lost you job because you got sick?

Too fucking bad. Shouldn't have gotten sick, should you?

Oh, and the deficit?

Oh, yeah, that.

Well, you see, the problem is that there's one bit of government that's doin' just dandy. And that's the outfit across the Potomac over at the Five-Sided Funny Farm. Yep, there's terrarists about, bucko, lurking perhaps under your very bed, and we needs to hunt them. So there's guns for the Army, ships for the Navy, it's a regular American Patrol. Great big satellites for the spy agencies, teeny little torture cells for the interrogators...all those things cost money, you see.And since we've cut our revenue intake with all those tax cuts, see...well, you can just imagine.

So here we are; in the Dream Time of the Tea Baggers. No federal control of stuff like education, so we can go back to the good old days...ummm...well, when...okay, let's move along. How about that interstate commerce, eh? With no Department of Commerce and no DOT, it's cool, the freeways - what's let of them now that most of the bridges have collapsed - are cool, like that scene from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where Ike Turner's ol' lady chases Mel Gibson around the desert and shit blows up an' stuff? And everything is like the Home Shopping Channel, where you can sell your Pillow Pets and buy gold and everything absolutely without any worry about annoying things like child safety or fraud investigations...

I mean, do these daft fuckers ever really THINK this stuff through? Do they ever think about, for all the irritating aspects of the Nanny State like the "Caution; Do Not Eat!" warning labels on the little white packet inside the beef jerky bag and the tipping toddler on the 5-gallon buckets, how much of modern life is actually simplified, assisted, and detoxified by the sorts of things that the government does that they don't want to pay for?

Or the simple reality that the three biggest lumps of the spending they profess to hate are Defense, Social Security, and Medicare, and that they won't give up the first and the other two are, in a lot of cases, what has helped keep the U.S. from becoming a social basket case like fucking Zaire - they help keep your mom and dad out from under bridges and from living out of shopping carts, and if they are suddenly, drastically cut the flood of poor old people into the streets and fields will make the Depression look like a rural frolic in an old Swedish movie?

Do they think about this stuff? Do they really have a plan, other than a trip back to the U.S. of 1890? Or are they just saying the stuff they say because they know it appeals and have never had to govern and really make the hard choices?

This is frustrating, too, because the "grown-up" version of these nutballs spent eight years handing the U.S. to their crony capitalist buddies, raping and fucking over every piece of it not owned by somebody named Koch or Abramoff, and getting the nation involved in land wars in fucking Asia, forchrissakes. And those were the SMART ones, not the ones whose vita lists their greatest accomplishments as "not being a witch" and getting paid for handing out Rand Paul fliers.I understand people's frustration. We handed the keys to a bunch of drunken frat boys and they pretty much slammed the national car all over the road for two terms. So we handed them back to the "reasonable" ones, the ones who said they were going to "Change" all that crap. And, mostly, it didn't change. And so now we're pissed off.

But so now our answer is to find the goofiest, most looney versions of the fucking gomers who kept bashing our national head into the concrete like a eight-year-long episode of "Jackass" and give the wheel to THEM?

What. The. Fuck?Are we really that stupid?

Driftglass - whose sandals I am not fit to unloosen - says yes we are, and, what's more, said it all six fucking years ago.

THAT's the real frustration. It's not like this is a black swan. IT's not like we don't know that these people are "...people (who) never vote for good government; they don't even believe in government. They're spoiled little toddlers who freak out when they're expected to share. They don't think they have to pay for anything that they take. And they're right--they don't."

I'm not one of those who think that this is some sort of unforseen, unprecedented horror. The American electorate has been full of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision many times before this, and surely will be again.But most of us have been comfortable, fat, and careless for so long. The extraction operation that the New Deal and the social liberalism ran on the robber barons and the oligarchs that revelled in the Dickensian poverty of the nation for generations until they ran the ol' S.S. StarsnStripes on the financial rocks in 1929 has lulled us into thinking that we can never go back to the Gilded Age of Victorian slums and plutocratic rule again.But I will argue that the New Deal was a one-off, an unusual concatenation of massive elitist failure, autocratic liberalism (my pal Andy would tell you that FDR was a sort of kinder, gentler despot; I'd argue kinder, hell - the man was a fucking political piranha who used the idiocy and greed of his enemies [who were his social peers] to gut them and stuff them into a political hole for a generation) and transformative policy that was so effective in grinding the old American paradigm down to stone-hard bedrock that we have now forgotten what it was like for most Americans in 1928. That most of us lived at or near poverty and always had, that a short, filthy, brutal, hard working life was the lot of most people, and that nearly a quarter of all Americans were poor; really poor, dirt poor, hardscrabble poor all of their lives. People ate bad food, lived in hovels or slums that would embarass Sierra Leone today, worked in intolerably dangerous and backbreaking ways and died, usually early, of disease, malnutrition, or injury.And the big difference between 1928 and today is that a lot of those poor Americans back in the day were rural poor. They had farms and knew how to farm. Even when times were bad they had some hope of growing or raising something to eat.

Today we farm our crops at the SuperFresh or the Piggly Wiggly. When we lose our jobs, or get sick, or hurt, and there is nothing there to help but the meager donations of some church ladies and a scattering of soup kitchens and county shelters? We're gonna starve, and quick.

But none of this seems to matter to the Tea Baggers. They want their Gilded Age back, and nothing, not even their own lives and the lives of their fellows, will get in their way.