I thought I was too far down the food chain in the blog world to ever get THIS problem, but I finally got comment spam… gyaaaaackkkkkkk! So I had to go learn a little bit more about how wordPress works. I’m now waiting to see if the fix works. If you try to post a comment and it gets tossed, please email me at tankerATmostlycajun.com.
Monthly Archives: October 2004
CLASS ACTION PAIN
“Another note about ambulance chasing trial lawyers. I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis and am angry over the legal vultures circling over the Vioxx recall. There are ads all over attempting to recruit class action clients to use in reaping huge legal fees in their lawsuits against the makers of Vioxx. The drug was voluntarily recalled by its maker who has attempted to provide relief from the constant pain suffered by millions of arthritis suffers. The drug was approved by FDA, and no one set out to cheat the public.
“It’s exactly this type of legal harassment that discourages drug companies from developing new drugs to improve the lives of millions. Not one attorney has ever provided one hour of pain relief or saved one life from the ravages of cancer. It’s high time that the laws regarding class action lawsuits be changed so that sometime during my life a drug company will be able to use their resources to develop new drugs rather than pay ambulance chasing attorneys. These greedy attorneys are having a very negative impact on my health and I am angry!â€?
– News & Views reader Dick Horak of Spearfish, SD
(This post lifted from Chuck Muth’s News & Views)
Nature calls…
Over at Frizzen Sparks, the Graumagus relates a wintery tale involving a call of nature. Let me warn you up front. Do NOT have food or beverage in your mouth when you read this.
Of course, I have my own tale of woe, posted a few months back.
And cold?!?!? I once took a leak while walking patrol on Freedom Bridge in Korea in the winter of 1970. It was so cold that we’d leave our barracks at the foot of the bridge with hot water in our cnateens, and by the time we made the first lap to the far end of the bridge, the water was frozen.
Here’s picture of Freedom Bridge. It connects the normal part of South Korea with the military zone north of the Imjin River and south of the actual DMZ. The Imjin River cuts a little triangle of land from South Korea, and when I was there that little chunk of land was peopled only by the American military, units of the Second Infantry Division.
There were only three bridges from that chunk of land, Freedom, Liberty, and “Spoonbill”, a temporary bridge consisting of some pontoon sections and the bridges of two AVLB’s (Armored Vehicle Launched Bridge). It was commonly calculated that the units north the Imjin River had a life expectancy of half an hour if North Korea ever crossed the line. One of our jobs was to insure the security of the bridge until the engineers could drop it in the river. So every now and then it was our turn to guard the bridge, which involved foot patrols down the length of a structure laced with live explosive sufficient to blow it (and us) to useless bits.
So we walked the bridge. Imagine this in January with the Siberian Express blasting frigid air from the Artic. And you’re a young soldier walking your post from one end of the bridge to the other. You’re wearing every bit of cold-weather gear you own: civilian cotton long johns under your scratchy GI woolen long johns. Then your woolen winter uniform pants and shirt. Over that, you’ve got on GI field pants with liners. Your top half has a field jacket with liner, and on top of that, a parka with liner and wolf-fur-lined arctic hood. And trigger finger mittens with woolen liners. And on your feet you have civilian thermal socks and GI “Mickey Mouse” boots.
You’re going to be walking back and forth the length of that bridge for four hours. In single-digit temperatures and thirty mile an hour winds. Every other of our posts on the Imjin River were on twelve-hour shifts, but the bridge is so brutally cold and exposed that they only put you up there for four hours. You pass the time by listening to the river ice grind against the bridge’s piers, and you look at the holes left in the bridge’s structure by the war. And in the middle of your tour of duty, you get the undeniable urge to relieve yourself.
Well, that was me in January 1970. And I pissed into the Imjin River from Freedom Bridge. And it was so cold that there was no splash as my contribution to the river hit the ice below. Nope. It was already frozen when it got there. It wasn’t an easy thing, either. Read over the clothing list again. There’s a lot of distance there from the inside to the outside…
What else could I do? You look at that picture. That’s a railroad bridge converted to carry a single lane of military traffic. There’s no room for an outhouse. And you DIDN”T leave your post unless you were carried off. Needless to say, my little contribution was not the only one made to the Imjin over the years from the heights of that bridge.
This ought to help you decide…
Dad always told me that you could judge somebody by his friends. Well, This article in the Jerusalem Post shows that John F. “Traitor” Kerry has garnered a couple more endorsements from foreign governments.
The Palestinian Authority made its first open statement Monday expressing support for US democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said that the future of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is unsure if George W. Bush is re-elected to office.
And he also got this one, in the same article:
Meanwhile, Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has also urged Muslims in America to vote for US Senator John Kerry in an open letter dated October 15 to America’s Muslim community saying President Bush has been “the cause of the tragedies” across the Muslim world.
Mohamad retired last October mired in a controversy after telling a summit of Muslim leaders that “Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”
Yessiree! Knowing that Kerry is building support among foreign leaders just gives me the warm fuzzies…
Oh, yeah! It’s REALLY bad!
Varifrank has this article where he talks about the employment situation in his area. Now, I tend to believe that Varifrank and I operate in very different orbits as to what we do for a living. I don’t know what he does. I work with the electrical power systems of heavy industry. And I tend to believe like he does.
Anybody in this area who has a skill involved in industrial construction and maintenance is working. Period! If you’re not working, you just don’t WANT to work. Contractors are crying for help. People travel into this area from long distances. The job market is booming. And that’s just the traditional heavy crafts like welding, ironworking, electrical, and such.
If you step out a little further into MY specific arena, then I can tell you how it is. I’m in a big bind. There absolutely NO prospective hires available above the entry level. If I want to hire a technician who can hit the ground running for my company, I am out of luck. There aren’t any who aren’t already working for me or with companies in similar business. I’m looking at the strong possibility of acquiring another major client in the short-term future, and I don’t have local technicians to cover that contingency.
Part of the problem is that there is almost a stigma attached to traditional blue-collar work in this country today. Few voices outside the trades speak of a vocational path in education other than to propose it as the alternative to students who just don’t appear to be college material, and folks, this is hurting America just as surely as many other issues concerning education. We desperately need talented people at every level of endeavor, and the higher education bunch is not addressing this need.
Motor Pool Daze
Cajun sabotages Cold War Effort
One of the facts of life as a tanker was the motor pool. For every joyous hour we spent roaring over the countryside or at the range, there were interminable hours spent in the motor pool. A tank is a huge conglomeration of parts, and it always seemed that several of them were loose or otherwise not working. So we spent days in the motor pool cleaning, tightening, lubricating, changing parts. Tanks are heavy things, and working on one often meant heavy physical labor.
A single track block weighed 80 pounds. An M-60A1 tank had EIGHTY on each side, huge things of rubber and steel, and each block was fastened to its neighbor by two steel end connectors, each with a 15/16″ bolt, and one center guide, looking like a great steel molar with its roots sticking up, and the center guide had an 1 1/4″ nut, for a total of 240 fasteners on each track. These had to be checked for tightness every time the tank moved. And that was just the tracks.
We had road wheels, support rollers, engine and transmission oils, engine fuel and air filters, hydraulic systems in the turret, SIX huge batteries, various linkages for steering, accelerator, brake, fire control… The list goes on and on. Suffice to say, there was always something on a tank that needed attention.
One one particularly fine Friday we were way down the list on things needing attention, and we were doing “spot-painting” inside the tank, the turret and the driver’s compartment, restoring the white paint on places where it’d been worn off by use.
Now, in the army of my day, you didn’t just walk up to the motor sergeant and grab a can of white enamel. For all the billions spent on the Cold War, paint was a fairly rare and valuable commodity, hoarded and issued in dribs and drabs. And on this particular day I’d managed to cadge a little bit, maybe a half of a quart can. My driver and gunner were inside the turret dabbing white paint on worn spots. Good! All was right with the world.
Well, not exactly. Every paradise had its serpent, and mine was in the form of another tank commander who had a very well developed skill in the area of kissing up. This is a skill I never bothered to cultivate, but he did it well, and was the platoon sergeant’s favorite. For example, on days when I knew I and my crew would be down in the motor pool grubbing around the tank, I wore an older, less impressive set of fatigues. This guy’d show up in a highly starched pair fresh from the laundry EVERY day. My name was high on the company roster for proficiency in technical subjects. His was high on the list of knob-polishers.
So I’m piddling around on the outside of my tank, and here comes the kiss-ass.
“You found some white paint, I hear,” he said.
“Yeah, I got half a quart. The guys are in the turret touching up spots right now,” I said. I knew where this conversation was heading. This guy’d never expend HIS energy off on a scrounging mission when he could stand around looking very military and sucking up to the platoon sergeant and the lieutenant. He was the personification of the adage, “AN ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.”
“You gonna let me have some of that?” He wasn’t bashful about asking.
“I tell you what, if I have some left, you can have it.” He turned and headed straight down the tank line to the platoon sergeant, my immediate supervisor. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I can imagine how it went. Presently, here he comes back, with a little chicken-shit smirk on his face.
“Platoon sergeant said you were gonna share that paint with me.”
“Let me see what they have left,” I said. I knew my guys were about finished, but I wasn’t gonna make it easy. I climbed up to the loader’s hatch and looked in. The guys were busily dabbing. I told them what was going on. The gunner says, “Tell ‘im to get a can and we’ll give him some.” So I did. And here he comes with a Coke can with the top cut out of it. We dump it about half full of white paint. We keep that to finish our turret, which is all I wanted. I presented the kiss-ass with the rest of the can.
“Well, that’s not very much,” he said. “I need more’n that to do my turret.”
And this is where the evil within me spoke. “Oh, mix it 50-50 with diesel fuel. It’ll thin out and go a lot farther, and smoother, too.”
Now, you may not know it, but I was an award-winning industrial arts student in high school. I know what it takes to thin paint. Diesel fuel is not on the “recommended” list. Oh, it will, as I said, thin the paint nicely. And being oily, it will make the paint flow beautifully off the brush. In fact, diesel would be perfect, except for one TINY detail. It won’t dry. Not in MY lifetime, anyway. So the kiss-ass minces off merrily with his can of paint and his new-found knowledge.
The platoon sergeant comes over a little bit later and notes that I did indeed act like a good team player and share the paint I’d taken the initiative to obtain. As we shut down later that day, I related the tale to my crew, and they snickered.
Fast forward to the following Monday. We’re all back down at the motor pool, doing our Monday routine, cranking engines, checking oil levels, etc. And I’m standing in front of my tank looking at the driver as he’s running the engine. And here comes the kiss-ass. But this time, his normally immaculate highly starched fatigue uniform is spotted with white patches on the shoulders, the butt, and several other places. There are smudges on his hands. And boots. He’s even got a smudge on his nose. I tactfully refrain from telling him that the nose smudge covers up its normal brown…
“Somethin’s wrong with that paint you gave me, dammit!” He’s in a gripey mood. I cannot imagine why.
I put on my most innocent demeanor. “What?”
“It didn’t dry. It sat the whole stinkin’ weekend, and it’s still wet. I ruint these fatigues!”
“Hmmmph! It worked fine for me,” I said. “You wanna get up there and look at mine?”
“Nah. But why didn’t it work in MY tank?”
“Maybe,” I said, “there was something wrong with the stuff in the bottom of the can.” And that’s where I left it. He had to wipe all the paint off the inside of his turret with rags. this took much longer than it did to put on. And to this day, I’m not sure that he was ever really sure that he’d been soundly screwed. What I do know is that I moved way down on his list of people to borrow from…
Electrical blow-ups
decrepitoldfool commented on my previous post where I noted “…considering the lethality of what we work with.”
He relates a story:
Here in McLean County, IL, the building manager of our Law & Justice center was on his way to church when his pager went off. There was some problem with the power system at the center. He sent his wife & kids off to church and went in to check it out.
In the basement of the building, everything looked fine, guages reading nominal. (His recourse if there was an anomaly would have been to call Illinois Power.) No apparent problems. Finally he gave up and left the room to go join his family at church. He walked about fifty feet down the hall when the main transformer exploded, blowing out the concrete wall of the room he’d just been in. The building went dark and filled with smoke, which terrified the prisoners and resulted in general chaos. (This account is based on newspaper report so technical details are probably a half-bubble or more off-plumb.)
He was slightly hurt and the center was closed, with prisoners transferred to other facilities around the state, until State Farm insurance (whose world headquarters is in Bloomington) donated a couple giant generators. The county is suing Illinois Power because it was their equipment which obviously had some problem.
Well, this sort of thing is my business. Since it’s a second-hand version of a newspaper report, I can only imagine the technical aspects. I’d have a bunch of questions, like what caused them to page the guy in the first place. There are only a few indications on a transformer that would indicate a problem: High temperature is one, and this is usually an alarm item. But if I walked up to a transformer that was suddenly running a high temperature with no significant change in load, then I’d be on the phone to a bunch of people, including (in this case) the power company and a good generator rental service.
Since this was a “prison”, let me relate to you MY prison power story: Just about twenty or so miles to the north of where I’m sitting is a medium security facility owned by the State of Louisiana. Several years ago, one of the local electrical contractors called us. They’d been called to the prison because of a “transformer blow-up.” We do work on transformers way past the scope normally done by electrical contractors, so off I went. The problem wasn’t actually IN the transformer, but rather the switch which determined which of two high voltage sources fed the transformer.
The transformer itself was installed in a little utility room in the prison’s maximum security cellblock, and there was an open window next to the utility room door. That window was heavily barred, but it was in the guard’s office. When he saw me first walk up, the called to me and I asked what he’d heard. He said it was a loud blast, like a big shotgun, then the lights went out. He and I laughed about the idea of a shotgun blast in a prison. I imagine his laughing was a relief, because I’d bet when that transformer went off, he had other ideas in mind.
Anyway, I tested the transformer just to make sure it was okay, then discussed with the electricians what they needed to do to repair the blown-up switch. After everything was repaired, I was on my way. Of course, being a good steward of my company’s business, I left business cards with the maintenance people at the prison.
Fast forward a few months.
About ten at night. I get a phone call. Could I please hurry over to the prison. All the lights are out. ALL THE LIGHTS. So I do indeed hurry. And when I get there, I find I have been told the absolute truth. The prison is in the dark. Not a single light on, except for the headlights of the prison guards who are now sitting OUTSIDE the fence in their pickup trucks, shining their headlights through the double security fences into the prison compound.
I drive around to the prison powerhouse, which is (fortunately) outside the security fence. When I get there, I am met by the maintenance manager, the “electrician” and two prison trustees. I ask what they know, and they don’t know much. They did determine that the fuses had blown on the pole where the utility company feeds the prison. We’re waiting on the utility company to come replace the fuses.
By flashlight, we go into the powerhouse and I start looking at the big line-up of 13,800-volt circuit breakers. One of these should have tripped for sure unless the electrical fault was between the utility pole and the powerhouse. If there was a fault between the pole and the powerhouse, we were out of luck. But that wasnt the case. My flashlight was shining on the indicators showing me that the fault was on one of the two high voltage cables that circle the prison, powering up several different transformers. None of the breakers had opened. I had them all opened at this time so we could investigate the problem.
The arrangement was what we very descriptively call a “double ring bus”. Two cables make a loop around the facility, hitting each of the transformers. Each transformer has a big selector switch which lets it take power from either of the two feeds. This is normally a very good system. Here’s why. One of the cables had failed. Normally, this means that the circuit breaker for that cable and that cable only would open. Of course, the transformers feeding off that cable would become deenergized, and they’d lose whatever loads were on those transformers, but not the transformers feeding off the other cable. And as soon as a determination was made that it was a bad cable, all they had to do was switch the affected transformers to the other feed and all the lights would be back on. That’s the way it’s meant to work.
What happened, though, is at some time prior to this problem, they had trouble with a battery charger. The “electrician” didn’t know what that big bank of batteries was for, so they just killed the battery charger and let the batteries run down. And nobody knew there was any sort of problem, because the batteries had only ONE function in life, to trip those big circuit breakers in case of a fault.
In the electrical power business, there are a couple of terms I want to briefly explain. The first is “selectivity” as it pertains to protective device operation. Selectivity basically means that you want to trip off as little equipment as possible in the event of a fault. In our case, ONLY the circuit breaker supplying that one feeder cable should have tripped. The rest of the equipment should have stayed on line.
That’s the second term, coordination. Simply, that means that an upstream device like the main breaker that feeds the line-up of branch breakers will trip slower than the branch breakers, if both see the same level of current. What should have happened was that the main breaker and the branch breaker both saw the fault current but the branch breaker was set to trip much faster.
But without the battery bank to supply the trip power, NONE of the breakers tripped. And the next protective device up the line was the pole-mounted fuses. These too saw the fault current and blew after the appropriate time lapse. And ALL the lights went out.
The guy from the electric company showed up and put in a new set of fuses. We went back into the powerhouse to close the main breaker. But there was a hitch in this plan. The same batteries that provided trip power also provided power to close the breakers. I asked how they’d been closing breakers. The “electrician” said they just stuck a bar in that hole in the front of the breaker and pulled up. I sort of shuddered. The “hole” and the “bar” were tools meant for use in manual operation for maintenance, not for closing under load. But he knew his equipment, right? I soon found out differently.
He maotioned for one of the prison trusties, a young black fellow, to come over and close the breaker. This was successful. Then he closed a breaker that fed the station power for the powerhouse. Lights came in in the powerhouse. Me and a platoon of prison guards and the “electrician” then went into the prison and switched all the transformers off the failed “B” feeder onto the presumably good “A” feeder. I was thinking that this should get the lights back on inside the prison.
So while we were standing around talking about the next step, the trusty went over and closed… the wrong breaker! The one connected to to the failed feeder. And the brand new set of fuses on the pole outside blew. And all the lights went out again. I reached in my back pocket for my flashlight. I illuminated the phone for the maintenance supervisor to call the utility company, and they turned their guy around before he got home. Luckily for us, he had just one more set of fuse links, and in a bit we had the lights back on.
This time we got the RIGHT breaker closed, and the prison lighting returned to normal. So I told them that night, and I wrote in my official written report: “Fix the battery charger. Get the old feeder replaced. You’re running on your ONLY feeder now.”
But this was a part of Louisiana government, where competence is but a word in that big book on the shelf that doesn’t have a lot of pictures so nobody reads it.
Fast forward a year. Near midnight, the phone rings. “We’re in the dark again.”
So off I go. I get there, driving past all the guards in their pickup trucks, straight to the powerhouse. The utility company guy is right behind me. I met a contractor electrician there. And the prison maintenance manager and his “electrician”.
First get the lights on in the powerhouse. Okay! They’re on!
Now, I ask the maintenance manager and the “electrician” why ALL the transformers are still on the “A” feeder.
“Let’s put them on the “B” feeder. Ya’ll got that fixed a year ago, didn’t you?”
The hanging heads and silence spoke volumes to me.
“You mean the other feeder never got fixed?”
“No.”
“Well,” I said. “Maybe I can isolate the bad section of the “A” feeder and we can get part of the lights back on.”
They okayed that idea. So I set up the equipment to start testing. And while I was testing, the maintenance manager was telling me how these cables were thirty years old and needed to be replaced anyway, so he hoped they’d all fail. The cables failed. The music I’d been hearing changed from “I hope this old crap fails” to “Omigod! What’re we gonna do now?!”
I gave him the number to Aggreko, a major supplier of portable generators. “You’re gonna need at least three big ones, here, here and here.” I pointed to locations on the prison’s electrical plan. “I think these guys (pointing to the electrical contractor) will get things connected for you. And they can change the cable out. If you want me to test it when they’re done, call me.” And I took my signed timesheet and left.
A week later I got the call to come test the new cables. Approaching, I saw three big Aggreko diesel generators and their fuel tanks sitting around the prison. My tax dollars at work.
I expected that the contractor would be waiting for me with the cables finished when I got there. Nope. I found upon arrival that the electrical contractor doing the installation was not the same company that I’d been working with before. THAT company was a highly competent bunch, supplying trained workers capable of doing any task in a heavy industrial environment. High voltage cables were an everyday job for these folks.
What was out there installing cables was small-town electrical contractor, apparently some sort of “brother-in-law” deal having been made. And while these guys might be fine installing the 277-volt feeders for a Burger King restaurant, they were over their heads in dealing with the 15,000-volt cable they were installing here. First thing I did was give a quick class on high voltage cable splicing and terminations. My words were eagerly received by smiling, bobbing heads. And off they went. Their foreman confided that they had a real high-voltage cable guy, but he was off sick with the flu. By mid-afternoon, they were ready to test the cable. So I hooked up my test set and began the application of test voltage. This was a 15kV cable, and I was headed for 65,000 volts, the standard test for new cables of this type. But I got to 8,000 volts and < <CLICK!!!>> the set tripped off. It had failed!
The audience I’d acquired to watch my test was crestfallen. I wasn’t. It wasn’t totally unheard-of for a poorly made splice or termination to fail. Even brand new cable could fail, especially if it had been improperly handled during installation, like beeing pulled too hard or pulled around to sharp a bend. Competent contractors knew this and took the necessary measures.
All I had to do was locate the failure point so we could fix it. For this we had a little bit of magic called an impulse fault locator. We referred to it as a “thumper”. The idea was that you hook this thing up to the failed cable and a high voltage source, fill the thing (capacitor) up with electricity, and when it gets full the voltage causes it to jump a spark gap and dump into the cable. Then wherever the cable is faulty, the electricity jumps that spot with a loud “thump”. You can locate the fault spot with your ear. Except the sound is more like a pistol shot. And it was heard resoundingly in the middle of a yard full of prisoners in the midst of their afternoon stroll. To say that the sound drew more than passing attention is an understatement. You should have seen the heads turn!
We had our fault location. Down in a manhole where the electrical contractor had just spent several hours making up a complex splice. I descended into the hole and checked the splice myself. The top, the easy to reach part, was beautifully done. But the underneath, harder to reach, well, it had a hole in the tape that I could stick my finger into. I climbed out of the hole and called all the contractors together for another little training session.
This time I emphasized the salient points to successful high voltage splices: Clean. Dry. Proper sequence of taping. No voids. Proper thickness. I told them to make the guy in the hole doing the splicing as comfortable as you can get in Louisiana in August: Shade. A fan. Dry rags to keep his sweat off the splices. And we tried it again. Several hours later, we were ready to try it all again. And this time the cable passed. We disconnected generators and put the power system back right, except they still didn’t have the battery charger hooked up. I couldn’t convince anybody at the place that it was important.
That did not surprise me. They had a half-million dollar standby diesel generator in their powerhouse that had NEVER (according to them) run right since it was installed. They (and I) doubted that it would even start. And the maintenance manager and the “electrician” both regaled me of tales of their many faithful years of state service, but neither knew as much about their power system as a good home handyman. The fact that the place ran at all was an amazement to me. Had any of my industrial clients found their equipment in similar condition, heads would have rolled. But then, industrial clients had to show a profit. State facilities just have to exist…
The Third Debate – Universal College Degrees?
The Third Debate – Universal College Degrees?
Posted by Dick Culver of Culver’s Shooting Pages
A FEW COMMENTS ON THE FOLLOWING “MUSING”…
While this was written while Slick Willie was holding the reins of government, the same premises hold true today! This was brought to mind last night when Kerry was proposing methods of making it easy and affordable for the average student to “get� a college education! Hummm… Assuming that we are all on the same wavelength, what we will ultimately wind up with is the AA Degree to be substituted for a High School Diploma, and have about as much meaning in the long run! What we need to assign jobs is some sort of competency testing. They’ve already proposed this for teachers and the howl could be heard all the way to Mars! Test US? But we’re teachers (or educators). How dare you impugn our credentials? Having taught High School for over five years, that one is good for a good belly laugh!
I wonder if Kerry would be for an ethnic or reduced intellectual quota system for membership in the “Skull and Bones Society” at Yale? An elite organization with selective membership and requirements? Now we can’t have that now can we? Heh, heh, heh…
Smoke and mirrors using OUR money… Now who would’ve thought?
~ ROC ~
=============================================================
THE CURSE OF AN EDUCATED COUNTRY
By Dick Culver
Taken from the files of “The Master Jouster�
Well, the Clinton Administration has done it again! This time they have promised the entire country that all of our young people will be guaranteed two years at an institution of higher learning (college or junior college), presumably to gain at least an Associate Degree!
Don’t you wish they’d have had such a policy when you were young? Isn’t this new policy gonna’ make the United States the most well educated country in the World? Many of the kids out there are no doubt patting themselves on the back telling themselves how lucky they are that Bill Clinton is safely ensconced back in the White House for another term. Well, before everyone “wets themselves�, I think it would be well to take a closer look at this educational “bonanza� to see what it’s REALLY gonna’ mean for the future of our country.
Education falls into the same category as God and motherhood, there are no arguments against them that don’t make the critic sound like “Attila the Hun�. More education for the younger generation is always highly touted by the educational community (teachers, school boards, college professors etc.) and always hyped by the politicians thirsting to water themselves at the public trough… never forget, votes are where you find them! OK, OK… smart a$$ what could possibly be wrong with making sure all of our kids get at least a two year college education? In the words of Longfellow, “listen my children and you shall hear�…
I’m gonna’ work backwards on this one… Let me ask you a question and I want an honest answer. Let’s assume that you were asked to show up to the local Junior College Auditorium next Saturday Morning. When you arrived you were called up to the stage and handed a scrolled piece of parchment. Upon unrolling the document you found your name on a sheet of paper that said you were now a graduate of the “East Wolf-Dung Junior College” with an “AA Degree” in say, Sociology…? Great, right? But what if they gave one just like it to everyone in town (so that the entire population now has one)… worse yet, say you hadn’t even attended classes but now find that you are anointed with a “gen-u-wineâ€? degree! Would you be any smarter or better educated than you had been last week, or even yesterday? The answer is of course obvious to the most casual observer… certainly not! In other words, the simple act giving everyone a diploma doesn’t add anything to our educational quotient as a country or increase the productivity of the individual. The lack of scarcity of such a “wall hanger” would essentially strip it of any meaningful significance.
“Great Culver, you’re just starting your fifth paragraph and you’ve already missed the point and gotten off the subject!� Well now, have I indeed? I’m not so sure… Like the guy says, I’ve seen this movie before. You are no doubt assuming that this new policy is actually going to educate the younger education in the disciplines necessary to improve their lives and further the glorious destiny of our country. Unfortunately I sincerely doubt that this new policy will do much of anything short of accelerating our slide towards bankruptcy as a nation.
The administration’s position on this issue seems to be that if we can make a college education available to everyone, we will allow those trapped in a lifestyle by poverty to make something of themselves. Thus (the argument follows) we will eliminate (or at least reduce) crime, make welfare unnecessary and offer an opportunity for all youngsters, much as it says on the U.S. Army Recruiting Posters “to be all they can be!� An admirable position on the surface of it, but unfortunately the premise is based on assumptions concerning human nature that are somewhat at odds with reality.
My position on the entire question is based upon the following premises… The first is a rather unfortunate truism that while all men (and women of course) are born equal under the law, they are certainly NOT born intellectually equal. As is Allah’s plan (as of yet not revealed to the masses), some of us are simply smarter than others… Please understand, I don’t mean smarter by virtue of education, but smarter by virtue of being able to absorb academic disciplines. Basic intelligence cannot be pounded into a head unable to grasp intellectual concepts. Putting it as delicately as I can muster, some folks are geniuses and some are dummies… Most of us lie somewhere in between. Attempts to educate a dummy are doomed to failure, no matter how many programs are funded and mandated by an administration – ANY administration! Until genetic research allows medical science to change the chemical and mental functions of the brain, we must learn to live with reality. There is a difference in the mental capacity of individuals. No matter how many degrees you give a dummy, he’s still gonna’ be a dummy. More on this later.
The next problem that rears its ugly head is politics, ably aided by the social engineers (if the term “engineer” can be applied to such endeavors). Politics and political correctness being what they are, you can look for a repeat of the great “high school” scam of several decades past. What am I speaking of? Well, what happens is that it becomes politically incorrect not to promote a member of a minority, just as it is socially incorrect not to promote one who is incapable of reading his or her own diploma. When you combine the two you have the formula for a real disaster! After all, we can’t send these poor children out on the streets without a diploma… THAT just wouldn’t be right (or kind, or whatever, ad nauseum…). No matter that the poor kids now have a piece of paper (that he or she may or may not even be able to read) that says they have a high school education. What do they really have? Nothing actually, just a piece of paper… but the people of the United States can point with pride to the fact that the great preponderance of American Children have a high school diploma… Right, and my name’s Mickey Mouse!!
First, you’ve got to define what a High School Education is exactly!? I’ve been told by people in the hierarchy of the Marine Corps (who should know better) that we are getting a much smarter enlistee in the Corps than when I was a youngster because they are now required to have a High School Diploma to be eligible to enlist (and thus presumably smarter, more efficient, and better able to perform his or her assigned tasks). I answer with a chuckle. You’ve GOT to be kidding! We had a hell of a Corps in the old days even if we were less well educated (ahem…) and we used to win our wars(1), but then what the do I know! This (the requirement for every enlistee to have a high school diploma) is one of the greatest lies ever
perpetrated on the American Public. Now if we could administer a “competency test” to the holders of this “revered” piece of paper, then I might buy this rationale, but I know better… and so do you if you will admit it! If we were to test the supposed “High School Graduatesâ€? we would be impugning the abilities of those who assigned the diplomas(2), and in the case of the minorities, you can rest assured that the various bleeding hearts would land on us like a ton of bricks… Their attack always begins, “the test would be slanted to give the non-minorities an advantageâ€?… I submit that answers are answers… some people can answer the questions, and some cannot… seems fair to me. You’ve GOT to have some criteria for excellence or a lack thereof… A meaningless piece of paper will not suffice!
While teaching high school several years back, I had occasion to visit another school and noticed a banner hanging over the entrance to the lunchroom. It read “ALL of Our Students are Winners Here!� High sounding words indeed, and of course, I understood what they were attempting to say! The real truth is that not all of the students ANYWHERE are winners. You are always going to have a certain percentage of little intellectual “douche-bags!� Unfortunate but true… What the little piece of paper called a High School Diploma used to signify, was a differentiation between those who had the intellect and “stick-to-it-ivness� necessary to qualify for the diploma and those who didn’t. This has been superceded by a “politically correct document� that really says that the student attended High School just often enough and/or was of the correct ethnic origin to be awarded this piece of paper. The diploma must, of course, be awarded to avoid criticism by the appropriate ethnic watchdog group or bleeding heart liberal organization making sure everyone gets an equal education… They don’t seem to care that not everyone is capable of absorbing such an education!
This discussion does not even address one of the great failings of our current system, the essential “flushing� of the old “rote memory� requirements that worked wonderfully well for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The current educational dilemma owes its origin to the original “douche-bag�; a guy by the name of Dewey (the man who has the somewhat dubious honor to be the father of what has come to be called “Progressive Education�), but then that’s worthy of a story all in itself… another “Musing�, another time… No matter what the current educators say, “readin’, ‘writin’ and ‘rithmetic’ taught to the tune of a hickory stick� certainly produced a wealth of educated and productive citizens. Generations of Americans educated under those conditions have taken us from the telegraph, electric light, and the airplane to outer space and beyond… the current crop of high school grads are mostly just plain “spaced�, but then, I’m just old fashioned, I suppose! One should never be confused with facts of course when political correctness is at stake!
What does all this High School Diploma stuff have to do with offering everyone a two-year college degree? Well, if you haven’t figured it out by now, you may well fall into the “dummy� category! The point of the comparison is to indicate that much as the High School Diploma has become meaningless, so too would the AA Degree become meaningless and for the same reason(s). No one would be allowed to flunk (a verb), or deny a diploma to anyone for the same politically correct rationale. Soon an AA Degree would become necessary to get a job as dogcatcher! Is this what we want our educational system to degenerate into? A degree such as this would not be cheap in terms of money even if it was meaningless. Someone has to hire the instructors and professors! Now we have the Federal Government involved not only in the first 12 grades but in the colleges also. Bad “ju-ju� my friends! Never let “Uncle Sugar� get his hooks into anything that costs money, because (please trust me) you and I will wind up paying for this stupendous “boondoggle�… yes friends, you and I, and the public dole is again proliferated! Allah save us from this governmental intrusion into our paychecks and our children!
Political correctness has already begun to have an affect on our educational system in a negative manner. In a recent interview with the “Registrar of Harvard University�(3), the registrar was asked what the emphasis on quotas for minorities was having on their institution. His paraphrased answer indicated that educational excellence was being given a back seat to ethnic diversity! Not only that but he indicated if given a choice, they (and he) would always lean towards ethnic diversity versus academics… It strikes me as a travesty that our educational institutions have become more concerned about what pressure groups have to say, than the purveying of academic truth! This is truly a sad state of affairs, and it would appear to be only the beginning.
If the “AA Degreeâ€? goes the way of the High School Diploma, and I’m convinced that it will, we will be faced with a new dilemma. We have always used the college degree, even the AA Degree as an indicator of drive and intelligence on the part of the individual possessing it. Normally it cost its possessor many extra hours of effort on his or her own, and was considered (for instance) as a large plus on promotion boards within the military and police establishments. Since it will become just one more piece of paper, we may well have to go back to promotion examinations for individuals to advance in rank. This may well be a plus in the long run, until of course the political correctness angle gets figured in again. …And you wonder why I hate the “social engineers”…
Years ago people went to college to gain specialized knowledge to work in a specific field of endeavor. Initially at any rate most went to institutions of higher learning for such things as Medicine, Law, Religion, Education, and Engineering. Not everyone was cut out to be a doctor, an attorney, a minister, a teacher, or an engineer. While we do need some of these folks, we don’t need a preponderance of them! SOMEBODY has to do the day to day work! Not everyone is going to become a CEO, nor should they. Degrees in management, sociology and ethnic studies are well down the line in the needs of society! You’ll never hear this from the educators of course; no one wants to torpedo their own livelihood. Academic credits are often given in major institutions for such essential subjects as “basket weaving� and ethnic appreciation studies… gag me with a spoon! There may be places for such courses, but in my opinion a degree in sociology does not require the same mental exertion necessary for a person to become a “rocket scientist.� …Yet we (as a society) have come to regard a degree (regardless of the academic discipline) as a degree. We have the, “oh my, HE (or she) has a ‘doctorate’� attitude. My reply would be, “yeah, but a doctorate in WHAT?� Certainly a Doctor’s Degree in Ethnic Studies does not come anywhere close to a Doctorate in Physics or Chemistry in terms of effort or intelligence required!
Please understand, I am not trying to step on anyone’s toes here, I’m simply trying to point out that a piece of paper may indicate many levels of effort, intelligence and difficulty of acquisition! …Nor do all disciplines necessarily have the same degree of usefulness to society! I also realize that an individual with a “doctorate in basket weaving” may well have the mental ability to obtain a doctorate in physics. It may just be that the person holding the degree in “basket weavingâ€? simply has no interest in physics, but even so, all degrees are not necessarily the same! I personally have a much greater interest in history and political science (if politics can ever be said to be a “scienceâ€?… hee, hee, hee…) than I do in my own discipline (physics). My endeavors at the time however, required that I subordinate my personal desires to the realities of turning out useful work. Of course there was also the idiot that told me I was too stupid to get a degree in physics, and being one of the most perverse people on the face of the earth, I set out to prove him wrong! Boy did I ever prove HIM wrong, the rotten SOB! I cursed that clown for the better part of six and a half years (four of undergraduate and two and a half of graduate school)… the management guys got “duffer’s elbowâ€? while I burned the midnight oil!
Let’s go one step further however, let’s assume that each individual having obtained one of the current questionable High School Diplomas does have both the desire and the intelligence to pursue an AA Degree to successful completion. Further, let’s also assume that this is a degree that has some modicum of usefulness, i.e., management, accounting, or whatever… My question is this. If EVERY high school graduate goes on to obtain an AA Degree, WHO is going to do the useful work in society? Is the plumbing industry going to require an AA Degree to “strike for” journeyman plumber? How about electricians? Will we now have folks with an Associate Degree in Electrical Engineering hooking up the wiring in our houses? How about an Associate Degree in Sanitary Engineering (i.e. garbage collecting), or Custodial Engineering (janitorial work).I wonder if there is a college solution on how to utilize the shovel to dig ditches or use a push broom? I am not downgrading janitors or sanitation workers. One good sanitation worker might well be worth a platoon of mediocre engineers… What I’m really leading up to is the following. How will these degrees help our High School Graduates make more money or work their way up the ladder of success if everyone has one? Someone is still gonna’ have to sweep and clean (if we don’t want to wind up posterior deep in trash). Who will wire houses, install plumbing and other such useful chores? There is only so much money (or for that matter so many white collar jobs) to go around (unless the FED prints more of those funny looking green notes, thus fueling inflation even further). Will these same people (with their new degrees) now have to take the same jobs that they would have before (at the same money) even thought they are now “degreed individuals”? If this is in fact the case, what have we (or worse yet “they”) gained? I personally would vote to have really good men (or ‘persons’) as plumbers, electricians, contractors and the like. Who wants their new house to fall down or burn because of faulty wiring, or their commodes to overflow?
No my friends, what we’re looking at here is the worst kind of fraud. There are only so many jobs to go around with an excess of people to fill them… degree or not! This will simply be a very costly (to the taxpayer) program “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (to quote a little Shakespeare… see there, I’ll bet you “liberal arts types” didn’t think I had it in me, huh? Hee, hee, hee…).
In closing, I wish to note that some of the most intelligent, successful and productive folks I have ever known, have never been anywhere close to a so-called “institution of higher learning”. It is my contention that true success has little nothing to do with being given an academic break. Success is a matter of will and desire, not a meaningless piece of paper.
~ROC ~
End notes to “The Curse of an Educated Country”
(1) It can be argued with some success that “not winning” our last few wars was more a matter of political expediency on the part of our politicians, not intelligence or a lack thereof on the part of the troops. Here I’m just “jibing” the hierarchy who pass themselves off as being more intelligent and “all wise” by virtue of their assigned duties!
(2) The much revered and usually overrated educators.
..
(3) This interview was in a recent Reader’s Digest article, but the important thing here as I see it is that this attitude has invaded some of our most revered and prestigious Educational Institutions. What will a degree from Harvard be worth a few years hence?
Getting ready for next week
More about what I do for a living.
Next week is going to be a good one for our little office. My employer has five technicians at our local office, if you count me. We have two of those five on a countract with a petrochemical plant where they’re almost permanent, five days a week, every week. That leaves three of us. And next week our workload is going to require almost twenty technicians. So we’re borrowing a few techs from our Baton Rouge office, and a bunch from our Houston office.
Two of our clients scheduled major outages for the same week. I’ll be running a crew on one, seven techs and me. Due to budget constraints, what had originally been a six-day effort is cut back to three days. We’ll do a good-sized transformer, an outdoor 69kV oil circuit breaker, a few indoor circuit breakers, 13,800 volt, and some 480 volt, and a bunch of protective relays.
The other two guys are going to be at another facility with another ten technicians at a client-owned generation facility, doing a lot of everything we do. Their project will involve considerable amounts of overtime. As of right now, mine won’t.
Trouble is, the overtime thing is subject to immediate and drastic change. One thing these people pay us (well) to do is look for problems. And sometimes we find them.
Last spring one of my clients asked me to test the cables which fed power to a 1250 horsepower pump motor. The cable had not yet failed. They were just curious. So I tested it. Based on my test results, I reported that the cable was badly deteriorated and further serviceability was questionable. Since the cable was identical in age and installation to the feeds to six other motors, we tested a second one, with similar results.
As a result of my findings, many thousands of dollars were spent changing out thousands of feet of cable. And all this without a single actual failure. But as I told my client, you don’t want to ask the question if you’re not ready toact on the answer. Our selling point is that it is far better to find a problem during scheduled maintenance than by having a critical piece of equipment trip off during a high priority production cycle.
This preventive maintenance testing service is a majority of our business. It’s not too hard a sell to knowledgeable electrical engineers and others. And it’s usually pretty good work, but these big shutdown maintenance periods can be quite intense as there is always a big rush to get a lot of work done in a small timeframe.
When the plant isn’t running, it’s not making money, so plant managers are interested in in maximizing time on-line. Maintenance people have to get as much done as possible in small windows. Worsening the situation is that it is not just our electrical testing going on, but also a lot of other work by other crafts.
Packing a bunch of active workers in tight areas makes for a lot of opportunity for accidents. Our company has an extraordinary safety record, especially considering the lethality of what we work with. We take great care in identifying and siolating electrical hazards, but that’s not to say that you can’t walk out of the door of the substation and get run over by a forktruck.
Culver’s Take on Governmental Intrusion! Beware!
Culver’s Take on Governmental Intrusion! Beware!
(A great (and scary) article by Major Dick Culver, USMC Ret.)
Ladies and Gentlemen…
I wrote this one back about 1996 and updated it about 2002. Personal rights given up for the common good and welfare are seldom returned without a fight!
I personally would rather declare war on those of mid-Eastern extraction and offer a bounty… While it would be misused in some instances (no doubt), it’d be easier than extracating ourselves from a totally controlled society!
I have omitted the end notes from the “musing” in the interest of brevity (and it’s still VERY long), but there are some things that need saying. Feel free not to read it if it gets tedious, but I stand by my convictions!
BEWARE!
ROC
=============================================================
Privacy… the Most Precious Freedom!
From the files of “The Master Jouster�
By Dick Culver
In the words of a famous foreign born actress of several generations ago, “I vish to be left alone!� I do not wish to be investigated, phone tapped or spied upon without justifiable cause. I want to be able to travel within the boundaries of my own country without being required to produce personal identification, or travel papers. I live in absolute horror of some clown in a trenchcoat, or jackbooted uniform walking up and down the aisles of an airliner who “vants to see my papers� like something out of a bad WWII movie. I don’t want to sign papers when leaving or returning to my country swearing (or affirming) that I only have “X�-number of dollars in my possession. Quite frankly, if I haven’t stolen, embezzled or swindled someone, the amount of money I carry around is none of my Government’s damned business! If the “powers-that-be� have no proof of such wrongdoing they should not be allowed to hassle, search or interrogate me “just in case!� “Preemptive law enforcement� and “preemptive justice� are both extremely scary practices and should be absolutely prohibited! I was always led to believe that these were things that happened in other countries, not the good ol’ USA! Guess again, my friend, guess again!
.
Many of these things are already happening or are planned for us by a government that apparently considers all of its “subjects� to be criminals, potential criminals, subversives or illegal aliens. Any monetary deposits in the U. S. Banking system of $10,000 or more must be reported (by the bank) to the Federal Government .The Feds have tried repeatedly tried to get a cute little item nicknamed “the clipper chip� installed as the standard encryption device on all new computers. This little jewel would have a “back door� installed in it to allow the government to use a “key � to read your deepest secrets (but only if “they� deem your conduct sufficiently suspicious to warrant such actions, of course!). The Feds have just taken the first overt action to “police� the Internet , and unless I miss my guess, we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Only the other day I heard someone drive up to the house. Since I live up in the Idaho Mountains, an unannounced visitor is somewhat unusual. I stepped out to see who was paying me a visit. There, resplendent in his Kootenai County Deputy’s uniform was a friend of mine. “Bob,â€? I said, “what brings you up my way?â€? “Well,â€? he said, “we just got a ‘911 hang up call’ from your phone number, and I came up to see if you were in trouble!â€? “No, I think the wife was just programming the new telephone, and her finger must have slipped,â€? I said, “but I appreciate your concern!â€? He laughed and said “well, I didn’t see any bodies laying around, so I figured you were doing OK.â€? “Bob,â€? I said, “just as a matter of curiosity, do ALL 911 calls register on your switchboard with the name and address of the caller?â€? “Sure,â€? he says, “it’s a real safety feature in the event someone is in a bad enough way not to be able to talk to the switchboard!â€? I agreed, and as he drove away, I thought, well maybe some of the modern technology is being put to good use after all. Then I got to thinking…
Consider the following. Are any of you out there familiar with the latest item being purveyed by the telephone companies? I speak of the so called “Caller IDâ€?. I even got one of these contraptions. At first I was fascinated with the darned thing. Neat, I thought, what will they think of next? Until I got the first “phone call from Hellâ€?… One Saturday morning, the wife got a ‘wrong number’ call from someone who refused to believe she had dialed a wrong number. Hanging up did no good, and the lady continued to call. Since we had the ‘offending’ phone number registered on our lil’ ‘handy dandy’ Caller ID, the wife called the number back to see if it was the lady’s kids playing with the telephone. The lady who answered was most upset that someone could identify who had been making the insistent phone calls. She informed Gloria that she too had a Caller ID! Upon hanging up our phone, it rang again almost immediately. Gloria thinking quickly, answered “Sheriff’s Office.â€? There was an immediate disconnect and we weren’t bothered by ‘Ms. Whoever’ again. I checked with GTE. They assured me that they could put a block on our phone that would prevent my telephone number from showing up on anyone else’s Caller ID. Only one problem… this block doesn’t apply to “law enforcement Caller ID’sâ€? (located in the P.D.’s and Sheriff’s Departments)! “Big Brotherâ€? has special privileges! Telephone call tracing is no longer a problem (for the police)… it happens automatically, if someone with enough horsepower deems it to be ‘necessary’. Make an anonymous call to the Police?… Right, and my name’s Mickey Mouse! This is a potentially dangerous device! I want “Big Brotherâ€? to have this kind of ‘privacy depriving device’ about like I want a ‘root canal’! I have since seen a ‘small box’ advertised that you can install in your phone line. The “boxâ€? supposedly prevents your telephone number from appearing on anyone else’s Caller ID. I don’t know if it prevents it from appearing on the local P. D.’s switchboard, but if it does, I’m gonna’ own one! Do I plan on doing anything illegal? Nope, but if I do, it’s nobody’s business but mine until I commit the first overt act! I value my privacy over any perceived public good. It has to do with living in a free country, as I recall.
What other little goodies pose a danger to our right to privacy? I’ll list a few… How about those nice folks who have come up with the pet identification chips that are inserted between a dog or kitty’s shoulder blades with a hypodermic needle? These allow a ‘lost’ pet to be identified by a Vet with a scanning device that identifies the animal with a pre-registered number in the “implanted chipâ€?. Sounds harmless, right? I called the chip company (they had an ‘800’ number on their brochure). They informed me that ‘they’ were furnishing all participating Veterinarians with a free scanner! Upon being quizzed further, they allowed as how the ‘chips’ would permit a 9 digit number (some permit 10) to be placed on the chip… ever count the number of digits in your Social Security Number? Hummm… And of course, they assured me that there were absolutely no plans to use any of these things on humans… (Yet?). Worse, I have since listened to a tape by one of the Ph.D. ‘Electronics types’ who had been part of the research and development effort on this and other similar devices. He referred to the chip(s) as the “Demon Seedâ€?. This is a very kind description of the most ominous invention of modern times! The pet devices are what are usually called passive devices, but the military version is active. It’s powered with a tiny lithium battery recharged by the heat generated by the human body. This gentleman stated that appropriately injected human subjects could be closely tracked on the modern battlefield… as many as 500,000 soldiers at any given time using AWACS aircraft! These, of course would never be injected into civilians… unless…
How about those of Hispanic extraction? “Hey, Pedro… of course we (Border Patrol, local police, or whatever) know you are a U.S. Citizen, but what if you go somewhere else along the border? Those officers might not be so kind. Now if you (Pedro) will just have one of these ‘chips’ put into the back of your hand (or wherever)… you will always be recognized as a citizen!â€? Tempting? Under such circumstances, I’d say it might well make sense to someone often subjected to close scrutiny by the Border Patrol and/or police! What about young mothers being sold on this as the ultimate method of preventing abduction of their children ? What about newborn babies being injected at birth… or the hospital won’t be allowed to participate in Medicare, Medicaid or the new proposed “Presidential Health Insurance Planâ€?? How about welfare mothers?.. no chip, no welfare! Want a check cashed? …no positive identification (by chip, of course)?, no cashing of personal, payroll or welfare checks! As you can see, “vee haff our vaysâ€?… This of course, doesn’t even count the returning servicemen. A mass medical surgical “dechippingâ€?? I don’t think so… Maybe “Lee Harvey McVeyâ€? wasn’t too far off when he was complaining about the chip inserted in his backside??? The technology and the means currently exist, dear readers… all we need is an unscrupulous government to institute the next step…
Utilizing the same technology, but not quite so threatening on the surface, is the technology being used in the new Military I. D. Card. The latest cards can be scanned to bring up digitized images of the recipient along with any pertinent data deemed necessary. Supposedly as many as 80 pages of data can be recorded on the card. I “gar-ron-tee�, as they say in New Orleans, the next step is the ‘smart driver’s license’! Your image (your driver’s license photo) can be ‘scanned in’ using a device in the officer’s cruiser, from a card (the driver’s license) that can hold up to 80 pages of ‘rap sheet’, political affiliations, suspected activities, politically incorrect or anti-governmental attitudes, etc. All of a sudden privacy is a thing of the past.
Let’s carry it a bit further. Heck, why go through all the paperwork? Let’s just replace the driver’s license with a chip in the back of the hand! No more lost driver’s licenses, no more excuses, “just gimme your hand kid!â€? Don’t like the idea? No sweat, if you don’t want to drive, you don’t have to have one… You want to cash a check?… or collect welfare, or check into the V. A. hospital? Too bad! In the case of a Military Retiree wanting to use the P.X., Commissary or the Base Hospital, you’re outta’ luck! If you are a Marine or Navy Enlisted Man with less than 30 years of active service, you are a member of the “Fleet Reserveâ€?, and would have no more choice than an active duty serviceman… again, unless you wish to forfeit your hard earned military retirement! Of course it can happen, and unless we put up one hell of a fight, it’s gonna’ happen… no ifs, no ands, no buts… it’s gonna’ happen! All of this will be done in the pursuit of a kinder, more gentle society, of course, or to protect us from an unidentified external enemy (the Patriot Bill in 2002? …or Homeland Security?)… It will ALWAYS be for the children (or whatever the current buzzword will stand), whether we want it or not… And trust me on this one, ultimately we ain’t gonna’ want it, but it’ll be way too late!
The final and perhaps most dangerous application of the ‘scanner technology’ is the so called “cashless society�. The idea here is to remove cash from the hands of the citizens. Why would this be a good, idea, you might well ask? How would we buy things? How could we pay our bills? This seems like a crazy idea! On the surface, you’re absolutely right. From the Government’s standpoint, it has many advantages. Let’s see how it would work. First, everyone would be assigned a “National Bank Account Number� (corresponding of course, to your Social Security Number). You could still do business with your local bank, but they would be tied into a national banking system with everyone’s account number in it. If the National System proved be too cumbersome, it could be tied into a regional office (sorta’ like the Regional IRS office?). Any money that you made would be deposited to your account number by your employer. You would be issued your very own “National Plastic Credit/Debit Card�. Anyone wishing to do business (in the entire country) would be required to be tied into the National Banking System, much as most businesses now have ‘verification electronics’ to check to see if you have exceeded your credit card limit!
Beginning to get the picture? These things would work much like the current “debit cardsâ€? that are used instead of checks. When you go to the grocery store for instance, you would present your card to the checker. The checker would then run the card into the machine and deduct the “tabâ€? from your account. Ultimately, you would have the infamous “demon seed chipâ€? inserted into the back of your hand. Now, all you have to have done is to present your hand to the checker to be scanned. This will prevent “lost or stolen cardsâ€?, and eliminate “check forgeryâ€?. Counterfeiting will become a thing of the past. And, best of all (from the government’s standpoint), there would be absolutely no way to cheat on your income taxes! The States would be able to automatically deduct any State Taxes that feel are due them. If you disagree, you can always sue the Federal or State Governments as appropriate (right!). You could not leave the country with any cash. Swiss Bank Accounts would no longer offer to a haven to avoid taxes or to stash your ill gotten gains. The States would now be able to collect (deduct) sales taxes from “out of state salesâ€?. When working on “out of state jobsâ€?, your employer might be required to automatically deduct your ‘home state’ income tax… sound good? Not to me? If it does to you, I don’t think you’ve grasped the control “Big Brotherâ€? would have over its’ citizens… Frightening? You bet! Is it gonna’ happen? Unless we get off of our collective “backsidesâ€? and scream in our legislator’s ears, it’s just a question of time.
Is “Big Brother� capable of doing these things? You bet your sweet fanny he is. Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s the BATF was opening the U. S. Mail with no warrant or even a court order. I once offered to receive a rather questionable brochure from a company in California that had sent me an unsolicited advertisement for a book on how to make clandestine explosives . While I had no particular love for the BATF, I felt this particular booklet didn’t belong in the hands of high school kids. I called the BATF Office in Wilmington North Carolina and told them what I had received in the mail. The SAC, an attorney by the name of Dick Christopher seemed elated.
“We really appreciate this�, he sez, “we’ll even furnish the money (a whole $3.00 as I recall)!�
“No, consider this my contribution to societyâ€? sez I. I sent off for the darned thing and forgot about it… well almost, at any rate!
Something in the back of my mind, said, “careful, Lad, careful!â€? I called the Jacksonville (N.C.) Office of the FBI and talked to a good friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous, since I haven’t obtained his permission to bandy his name about). I explained what I’d had done (a sort of a verbal memorandum for the record). He told me to consider it duly noted. Several months went by and I got transferred to California… Still no book from the “California Connectionâ€?. The ‘infamous explosives brochure’ never showed up. Months later I got a call from my friend in the FBI who was just this side of being in hysterics (laughter, that is). He told me that he had just received a list from the Bureau (FBI) with the names of 53 people to be picked up and held in the event of any general uprising against the government (I rather suspect without the benefit of counsel or other legal niceties)! I can only assume that I was considered to be some sort of “mad bomberâ€? or political dissident… all because I ordered some damned booklet in the mail!
My buddy in the FBI called the Bureau and explained what had happened and had my name removed from the list. It seems that Mr. Christopher (the BATF SAC from Wilmington) had gotten transferred to Las Vegas after I was transferred. He had cleverly forgotten to mention to his replacement that I had volunteered for the “booklet ordering detailâ€?. All in all quite funny in retrospect, but what if I had trusted the BATF and hadn’t called the FBI to cover my fanny? What if there had been some sort of civil disturbance? Do you suppose they’d have locked up a U.S. Marine Corps Major without any sort of hearing?… Do you suppose they would have checked my record to see if I was really a threat to National Security?… Do you suppose the BATF was ‘messin’ with the U. S. Mail?… Nah, not a chance… Think they’d do it again? Certainly not! Just ask Assistant Treasury Secretary Ron Nobel who was testifying for the BATF at the Waco Hearings. Is an unsupervised governmental police agency dangerous to a free country? What do you think?
Skip to North Idaho, fall of 1984 (interesting date, eh what?). The Federal Bureau of Investigation had suddenly come up with an FBI Task Force to investigate the activities of the Aryan Nations (a local white supremacist group). While baking pies prior to Thanksgiving that year (I was a bachelor at the time), a GSA Rental Car pulled up on a logging road past my house. Stepping out to see who was calling on me, I noted two gentlemen in Levis and wool shirts climbing out of the car. They flashed what appeared to be FBI credentials and told me that they’d like to speak to me. I beckoned them into my kitchen, shoved a piece of pie and a cup of coffee in their hands. They seemed to be quite nice folks and we spoke of mutual acquaintances in the Bureau. When the niceties were out of the way, they got down to business. It seems that they had heard that I knew a number of members of the Aryan Nations! I asked where in the world they had heard something like that? I was informed that they were not free to disclose their sources.
I assured them that if any of my acquaintances were members of the Aryans, I was certainly unaware of it. I told them that the only member of the Aryan Nations that I would recognize on sight was “the Reverend Butlerâ€? (the titular head of the organization) who appeared on TV occasionally. The only other easily recognizable neo-Nazi individual in the area at the time was a comic opera character by the name of Keith Gilbert. Keith paraded around town in a Nazi uniform complete with jackboots and Luger Pistol. This guy was too good to be true, he hurled racial slurs at any ethnic minority who happened to be in town, and generally made an @$$ out of himself to anyone who would listen. Gilbert was the Reverend Butler’s former second-in-command. It was rumored that they had had some sort of conceptual parting of the ways under less than friendly circumstances, and Keith spent all of his spare time “bad mouthingâ€? Butler. Now it seems that the FBI wanted me to offer a firearms class for the Aryans so they (the FBI) could document and photograph them. I told them I had no problem with running such a class, but that they (the FBI) were going to have to organize and advertise the class. I allowed as how I’d be happy to work for them as a contract instructor, but if they thought I was going to get my name intertwined with those “Aryan @$$ holesâ€?, they had another think coming. I pointed out that when the “FBI Task Forceâ€? went home, I still had to live here, and I wasn’t interested in becoming identified as an Aryan! They thanked me, wiped the crumbs off their chins, allowed as how they’d be in touch and departed… I never heard from them again.
The point to the above story is that the Feds (or any law enforcement group for that matter) will often take the word of some unidentified “douche-bag� as gospel and hang undeserved inferences and labels on the current ‘object of their hate and discontent’. It seems to be up to you to prove you’re innocent of alleged or inferred associations or charges. If you doubt any of this, just ask Randy Weaver how many bank robberies he participated in… charges alleged by the Federal Marshals and the BATF to partially justify their actions at Ruby Ridge!
How about the purchase of a firearm? All citizens (non-citizens are not supposed to buy such things) must sign a form that logs the sale of that particular weapon by serial number. The form also certifies over your signature that you are eligible to buy the weapon (non-convicted felon, fugitive from justice, “stalkerâ€? or otherwise “unclean personâ€?). The so called Brady Bill requires a waiting period, check of your background, etc. Now, the current regulations prohibit the use of such information (serial number of the weapon and person to whom it was sold) from being compiled into lists. Gun owners fear such lists could be used by the Feds to confiscate their weapons if Governmental paranoia gets too great or some national emergency would be declared. If you really think the Federal Government isn’t (hasn’t already?) compiling such lists, I have some oceanfront property in Montana for sale… cheap! Why would they want to disarm our citizens? They expound on many benefits… everything from counter-terrorism to public safety. The “effeteâ€? and “timidâ€? assure us that crime would be immediately curtailed, accidents prevented and our lives made idyllically safe! While I could make some extremely powerful arguments to the contrary, this isn’t a discourse on gun control. The simple truth is that this whole thing breaks down to “People Controlâ€?. An armed citizenry is not easily controlled, manipulated or subjugated. We can only pray…
But I thought this was about privacy, not about gun control, bank accounts and computer chips. How did you get off the subject? Well, the question is, did I get off the subject?… Let’s take a look. The American Heritage Dictionary defines privacy as follows:
pri•va•cy n. 1.a. The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others. b. The state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion. 2. The state of being concealed; secrecy.
While definitions 1.a. and 2. are important, the definition with which I am most concerned is “b.â€?… the state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion! Intrusion from what? In this case, the important question is unsanctioned intrusion from whom? The answer is, of course, from “Big Brotherâ€? aka the Federal Government. Nothing is more intrusive than someone who can (or worse yet will) monitor your mail (electronic or handwritten), have absolute control of your money, finances and taxes, and listen in (unbidden) on your telephone conversations. It scares me for our government to have the ability to control our travel, our possessions and our lives. …And to disarm us so that we have no means to resist… The counter-terrorism legislation Clinton is attempting to have passed as a result of several contrived (or at the very least exploited) acts of terrorism, would make searches without warrants a reality… all in the name of a kinder, more gentle (and controllable) society. The scariest part of this is that a number of people surveyed actually indicated they would be willing to give up some of their rights for a “saferâ€? existence! “Gag me with a spoon!â€? No “rightâ€? given up voluntarily has ever been returned without a fight. Governments don’t work that way. They feed on power and they grow fat on the sweat and fruits of the labor of their citizens. They will not willingly give up power they have become accustomed to wielding! Carrying these concepts to their most terrifying conclusion, the “intellectual eliteâ€? would like to expand these concepts to “World Controlâ€?. Can you imagine a World Bank in a “cashless societyâ€?. The finances of the entire World would be in the hands of a self appointed few! Freedom and privacy as we know it would become things of memory. Implanted chips could track an individual to the furthest ends of the Earth! “…You can run, but you can’t hide.â€? Your finances could be distributed as “the Fewâ€? would see fit (except for themselves, of course)! Ordinary citizens would be reduced to the same level of mediocrity… all according to the whims or theories of the “enlightened onesâ€?.
Are you willing to give up your freedoms and your privacy for the greater good? Or do you want to be left alone to make your own way, make your own mistakes, fall down and get up again on your own merits? Is the “doleâ€? and a safe existence worth the price? When a “stateâ€? confiscates the citizens’ means of resistance and self defense, takes away their individuality, spies on them to ensure their compliance with governmental policy, controls their movements and their money we have something that can only be described as a Police State… Can you say “1984?â€?…
What’s YOUR privacy worth to you…?
ROC 1996
2002 Addendum…
I initially wrote this “Musing� back in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing (and obviously before the infamous Arabic Connection brought the Twin Towers crashing down).
Before 9/11 I was convinced (and still suspect) that the Murrah Building was not the work of a “lone bomber� or even a lone bomber and his Army buddy. That was the work of an organized ring of terrorists with John Doe 1 and 2 initially identified as of mid-eastern decent. It would be pretty hard to prove that the entire incident was “stroked by�, or worse yet known about but deliberately ignored, to give the Feds an excuse to pass the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill passed which would have never had a chance without a straw-man incident to use as an excuse. Because of several extremely embarrassing facts that the Government scrambled to cover up to protect their tail-feathers, it was necessary to hang the blame on a single individual (the “lone bomber�, Lee Harvey McVeigh… Hummm…). Even if the rest of the facts are not clear, as an Ordnance Engineer with considerable experience in explosives, I can tell you that it would have been literally impossible to have taken down the Federal Building with a Ryder Truck full of Ammonium Nitrate Fertilizer and Diesel Fuel – At best this is a “heaving explosive� (stump-blaster technology in application) and lacks the brisance (shattering power) of such explosives as TNT, C-4 and other military grade explosives or even commercial dynamite, necessary to reduce reinforced concrete to a pile of rubble! The truck would have had to have been parked in the lobby of the building to have done a third of the damage attributed to it! I have written about this extensively in other places, but some extremely high ranking officials participated in the cover-up or at least turned their heads to accomplish their goals.
While the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill did get passed after Oklahoma City, it was a watered down version, and not the far sweeping instrument of which Federal Law Enforcement had dreamed. The Arabs’ twin tower suicide collision incident succeeded far beyond even the Federal Government’s wildest wet-dream. If you will read the provisions of the Patriot Act and check out the plans for the new Homeland Security Agency, you’d better bury your unregistered firearms, buy some fractional hard gold coins with little or no minting charges (early 20th Century Mexican Gold coins work well), get some pre-64 U.S. Silver Coins and lay in some reloading supplies and inexpensive 500-round “bricks� of .22 ammunition for trading purposes. Unless I miss my guess, freedom as we and our forefathers knew has a very good chance of disappearing into the mists and myths of recorded history. Paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would trade freedom to secure temporary security will get nor deserve either.
For those who haven’t read it, the title of a book of some years ago called “Alas Babylon� is becoming more relevant in terms of a key phrase alerting the “faithful� to the coming of a monumental catastrophe – If you haven’t read it, check it out at the local library before the Federal Government has the mechanisms in place to track it to you! It’s worth the read. Although I’m not predicting a post-nuclear world, the results of a governmentally controlled society, or post-personal privacy world would be no less catastrophic! Perhaps I should have titled this “Musing� Alas Babylon?
Lord help us!
ROC 2002
My ‘druthers
I would rather be a free man, knowing full well that it meant at any time I would be attacked because my very freedom was despised by my enemies that to accept the promise of personal safety at the price of becoming slave to things in which I cannot believe.
Kerry’s “global test”, no, the whole thrust of his campaign, is that if America were more like dying Europe then we’d have fewer enemies in the world.
Somebody must have done a poor job of “educating” me, because I was born and raised an American. My country is defined by two pieces of paper, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and these are the pinnacle of the best thought of Western civilization.
I look upon the history of my nation and see a people founded on a unique mix of personalities and ideas. We did not come into the twenty-first century by standing chest-deep in the trappings and detritus of evolved monarchies and failed experiments in “Enlightenment”. We came to America as explorers, adventurers, seekers of freedom, a people who would not be trapped by the boundaries of the Old World.
Twice in the last century it was Americans who sent their best back to Europe to try to set the stage for the freedoms we enjoy. Twice, thousands of Americans saw their final days on the fields of Europe. And each time, the rescued sneered upon their rescuers, denying the essential vitality of our national character, the very character that incubated the strength that rescued them.
WE are truly unique in the world. There is NONE like us in strength, in vitality, in greatness.
Now we have John F. Kerry. In another time, his actions thirty years ago would have relegated him to prison, if not the hangman’s noose. He is become chief among the haters of America. He denies the very things that make us great. He says we need to emulate the gutless and abased nations of Europe. He does not even give us the position of “First among equals.”
And any temporary security which might come from his “plans” is only the security of the herd, hoping ot be eaten last…
Monday, Monday
Work stuff. I and one of my techs were out at a client site checking out a couple of sections of new electrical apparatus before it gets installed. The equipment consists of the motor controllers for three new 200-horsepower motors, and is meant to operate at 4160 volts. Our job is to go through the “gear” and check it out for correct function and assembly.
This consists of a bunch of tests because the actual equipment consists of a bunch of individual components, each with its won function, and each of these have to be tested. But we’re indoors, and the equipment is new, so it’s not bad work.
Now you’d think that if you just spent five figures for this equipment, and since it has the name of one of America’s oldest and most trusted electrical names on it, that everything would be right. And you’d be wrong. We found a problem. Actually, we found the SAME problem in all three that we checked out. And in another eleven that we’re supposed to be doing in December, but I had to peek because the client needs to know so he can turn in a warranty claim to get it fixed.
We’re not talking about rocket science here, folks, but it’s a mistake. It might not even be the fault of the person who wired the new gear. Typically, the assemblers of this stuff are not electrically knowledgeable. They know how to read a wiring diagram and if said diagram says run a #12 wire from terminal “A” to terminal “B”, then that is what is done, whether it makes sense from a functional standpoint or not. And this time it didn’t.
And that’s what our clients pay us for…
Adding to the blogroll
The Hopeful Cynic is added to the blogroll.
He’s got this great post with NUMBERS on the “tax cut for the rich” that the dimmos always want to talk about…. anybody who uses the term “quintiles” in a post has GOT to be good…
Kerry’s tax cut roll-back
DGCI has this little article on the effect of Kerry’s publicly avowed intent to roll back the Bush tax cuts. This explains very well how tax cuts help the economy.
Part-time jobs at low wages: the liberals would have you think these things are dead ends, but that’s typicla liberal bullsh*t. Get rid of part-time jobs and you make a lot of people give up extra incomes. You make a lot of kids more dependent on the government for grants and government tuition programs. But wait… that’s what libs want: more people dependent on the government, peasants beginning to be placated by tidbits from their masters’ table… That’s why our ancestors left the Old Europe. And the Left wants us back there…
Update-
Obnoxious Droppings has another take on it. He runs the numbers in this little piece. That’s the left’s ace in the hole: to finally get MORE people not paying taxes than those who pay taxes. Then they’ll have a lock on the ignorant and greedy among us. Remember, “He who robs Peter to pay Paul can depend on the support of Paul”