Chapomatic

I don’t know much about this guy–a youtoob from something called “def poetry season 2″ that apparently is titled that way just to make me feel old–but check the interaction between speaker and audience. He’s, uh, pretty articulate and likes teachers.

A page connected to freighter passengers with the thoughts of an American merchant captain. Good sea stories for lubbers.

From the Guardian newspaper, an interesting photo collection from a fellow who took pictures of his classrooms in the seventies.

Heaven help me, they’ve got me pegged.

Sorta. But it is too close for comfort. First car: ‘64 Studebaker Cruiser. Twenty-five bucks from some college student…

Argh. Well, it would have been nice to go to Lex’s retirement party, but no, he has to play hooky on the last day of school.

I have a while to think about that decision in my own case, thankfully. I went to one ceremony back in the day where I was very glad I went–I was but a wee nubbin and the dusty, crusty near-retiree had good stories to tell. Lex would have the stories, for sure.

Luckily he’s got the money flowing in from the blog…

“And then he said something about a cuckoo clock and ran into the sewer.”

Tom Wolfe on neuroscience.

Congratulations to retired NEX employee Mary Lou on getting her son back and having a little hope.

This is not the kind of phone call you want to have with someone deployed.

Oh, and. You know that “shipmate” thing? Might go the way of teufelhunden. Seems there’s a little trouble:

Over the past decade, however, Devil Dog faced a mutiny on all fronts, as its beloved Corps turned its back on history. During the fight to turn the Corps into a more politically correct society and eliminate insults and cursing, Devil Dog dropped off the radar of the senior Marines charged with keeping the notion alive.

Newly minted Marines, fresh from the drill field, would come to think of Devil Dog not as a vicious warrior, but as a screw-up, a goofball. In a world where cursing at a junior Marine is not allowed, Devil Dog took a beating. Officers and senior enlisted lost sight of its once proud meaning, and used the term primarily as a correction for negative behavior.

Adrift in the fight, Devil Dog went missing in action. But no one really noticed. Its status was officially changed to killed in action this week.

So of course for “shipmate” we did a survey and an essay contest, clearly the most effective way of changing a culture.

So I was in the Navy when a big wall of scandals came around. I was a junior pup. About the same time as that came the attempted cleanup of various unsavory practices real or perceived, and all of a sudden Navy acquired some words from the front office that supposedly were what we were all about. Nowadays you might have heard of it as “Honor, Courage, Commitment.” Before that, though, the words were different, and other words went down the memory hole. I’m sure there was good reason for at least one change, as one of those words in earlier decrees–”tradition”–could have been an escape hatch for some of those unsavory practices. Never mind that; the important thing was that one day I was told from on high that X was The Way Things Would Be, and the next day it was Not X. Coincidentally, it was about the time we had a “sexual harassment stand down” that essentially involved all hands being put in a room and fed power point slides–narrated by some direct input limited duty officer cracking jokes about gays and who the night before had been out all night with enlisted guys at a strip joint fraternizing in rather notable ways.

This is a good way to become cynical.

Me, I don’t dig the bumper sticker kind of change. Part of my reaction is a character flaw on my part. I don’t like to be told how I will think, especially by some nameless staffie who thought up something that looked good to a flag somewhere. The character flaw part is that I am too loud at inopportune times if not careful. But “honor/courage/commitment” has been around long enough that it’s no longer the flavor of the month and thus less in-your-face.

Something had to show up to maintain my sense of pique, and it was creed recitations. I attended a formation at a schools command. They recite the Sailor’s Creed at formation. Everybody. It’s in the plan of the week. Every week. I know of no naval tradition that resulted in such a creed, nor do I know of the value such creed-saying actually has. I do know that the creed goes against something I was taught long ago by the Army officer corps, that it is the moral obligation of a commissioned officer to not follow orders in rare and significant cases in order to follow the oath they took, and if this is so then an officer reciting such a creed is either lying or ineffective in extremis.

As I heard the students reciting their memorized creed led by a junior sailor at the microphone, I felt as though I was in some foreign church. Then I remembered this:

At the Datong coal mine in Chongqing Province, as in mines all over China, they are working around the clock. At least a couple of times a week, (and certainly with an American reporter preparing to join a crew of miners at the coal face) the shift begins with a safety briefing and a chorus of safety slogans, punctuated by the men punching their fists in the air.

“I am proud to be a coal miner here,” the men chant. “We have only one life to live and safety is the most important thing.”

Yeah, that’s where I hear creeds and daily required group affirmations: socialist tyrannies and militaristic corporate monocultures. Welcome, salarymen, and get in line.

Works great for them, too.

Actually, China has the worst coal mine safety record in the world. Only two months ago, 105 men were killed in one mine. Last year, approximately 3,800 miners were killed in accidents.

Well. Now we have this new “ethos” thing to deal with. The Yank Sailor has some commentary–he thinks perhaps this new bumper sticker will help make the old bumper sticker go away. (Yank, we’re still supposed to capitalize “Sailor” and will for a long time.) CDR Salamander is on the governor ready for electrical loading after nearly overspeeding a couple of times. I know of the action officer listed on the message; when I knew of him he was not a bad guy, and he may not even be the stuckee for this particular action. Lex distills his own creed down to that actual oath we take, and personally follows three words, all of which are actually printable. Last I heard, he wasn’t directing formations to recite them.

Me, I wonder why we’re spending so much time on things like this, with official websites and “blogs” and surveys and the like. Makes me wonder what the main thing is, on which we’re supposed to be focused.

The Miracle Marine has died. One amazing fighter, and one tough hombre.

(h/t Don Surber)

Everybody’s talking about PJ’s fake commencement speech. I think they’re just happy he wrote something this year…

A bear farmer?

I’m sure y’all have seen the drug submarine video by now…

Found a new (to me) blog, by journo and vet Mick Smith from the London Times. He’s the guy who keeps leaking U.S. planning efforts, whether correct or not. Blog has some interesting perspectives on military issues.

I’d like to send whoever’s leaking to Smith to somewhere unpleasant. That person or persons are attempting to change policy by releasing damaging information, and that guy isn’t the one who gets to make those policy decisions.

He says the same thing the smarter NGO heads have been privately saying: if you send a bag of corn as aid to Obscuristan, the Obscuristani farmer goes out of business, and next year aid will be needed even more. RTWT.

This is a link to a trade show video for a computer music program. If you’ve worked with a sampler, you might well be interested in what this thing can do–individually mung notes that are in, say, a strummed chord. It’s a far cry from some of the stuff I used to play with.

Buddy of mine says he’s helping on the hunt for USS Grunion.

They’re getting closer to the goal, too.

Who was that guy, anyway?