Now that the liberal health care "reform" (whatever it really consists of) is in trouble, they are talking about "scaling back" on their "program".
All I can tell you from my own experience here in Wash. state is that when the liberals use the words "scaled back" watch out for your wallet. What that really means is that they are conceding that they cannot get a whole loaf, so they will settle for half a loaf -- for now. Then after they have gotten their half-loaf, they will proceed to slip in the rest of their plan/program through the process of incrementalism. They will use the words, "Well, now that we've already started, we might as well go the rest of the way" or similar. They will sneak or bamboozle the rest of their originally intended program into place.
I'm no expert on the health care situation, so anyone please step in to correct me if I misspeak on the issue. Here are some random thoughts that come to my mind.
1. The way health care is paid for in the US certainly could use some looking into. However, it seems to me that any efforts at securing economies in health care are doomed unless torte reform (quickly given a hands-off in the current debate) accompanies health care reform. The high cost of insuring the medical profession is a major factor in a high cost of health care provision. Is it any wonder that torte reform was killed when most of the Congress consists of lawyers? Im going to speculate here, but I'm sure that the legal profession is well represented by lobbyists in DC. Significant torte reform resulting from health care reform would put a serious dent in the revenue stream of the legal profession.
2. People who favor some form of health care reform often point to government-sponsored systems in other (modern, western) countries. Please let's bear in mind that most of these examples consist of a social fabric that is different from that of the US. For one thing, most of them do not have the illegal immigration situation that the US has. For another, most of these countries do not have a significant underclass of financially needy citizens dependent upon social welfare. This underclass is the same part of society that tends to over-breed which contributes to the medical costs of that society. For a third, most of these countries have a society which is of a more homogeneous nature and makes for a more productive, orderly and organized citizenry. Most of these countries have much higher tax structures in place to support government-sponsored medicine, and most of their citizens of working age are employed.
3. Government provision of medical services in the US has not had a good track record to date. I cite the inefficient, inequitable, and poor service that the Veterans Administration medical services are known for. If people are afraid of "rationed care" through government medicine, they have to look no further than the VA for an example. The Medicare program/system is in a precarious way financially and will not survive many more years without serious revisions.
4. One of the main troubles with big government in the US is that there are so many different interest groups and contituencies involved in crafting legislation that a clean, clear-cut solution to a problem is never realized. An old addage explains much of it: "Too many people have their fingers in the pie" or "Too many cooks spoil the broth". By making sure that every hog has his snout in the trough, so many measures just wind up being a mess. That's probably what will happen with the current push for "health care reform".
5. You wait and see. Whatever program the current administration and Congress comes up with in the way of health care "reform," it will wind up costing way, way more than ever was stated or envisioned. Reason? A combination of things I have outlined above. Too many interests being satisfied; incremental add-ons to original concepts (just like what happened with Social Security); government inefficiency.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
The FEMA Concentration Camp Story is a Hoax, a Fake
The story about FEMA "concentration camps" has been going around for many years, since long before the Obama administration came along. The central theme of this hoax story is that The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) has built over 800 internment facilities ("concentration camps") that are empty but fully staffed and operational, and ready to accept large numbers of political opponents of the present administration.
On a right-wing website, I just reviewed the list of supposed locations of these places and it takes a vivid imagination for these right-wing groups to assert that that these camps are "active and fully staffed". The sites mentioned in the list that I personally know of are a joke. Tulelake California, site of a former internment camp of the Japanese in WW2? C'mon. The camp site was sold many, many years ago after the buildings were sold and moved or demolished. Yes, there is a wildlife refuge in the area and it, like any of the many other tens of millions of acres of federal land could be used as the site of an internment camp, but already built and fully staffed it certainly isn't. Same thing for Fort Ord, which is under re-development for mostly commercial purposes and the barracks have nearly all been demolished. The Army still uses an easterly chunk of what used to be Fort Ord, but there are very few buildings there. Terminal Island has had a federal prison located on it for decades, but it's on a small area of land fill surrounded on three sides by water and no way can accommodate a huge expansion of "FEMA detainees." Other sites listed as being in California are closed military bases where commercial redevelopment (or nothing) is going on and military buildings are being torn down.
One of the more preposterous examples is the "camp" in Alaska that is capable of receiving 500,000/2 million prisoners (the number depends on which website you visit). How somebody could come across a couple of facts and get the story so twisted contrary to what is real is beyond me. The reality behind this goes back to Congressional action on the Alaska Mental Health Act in the 1950's when Alaska was still a territory and had no territorial facilities to provide for care of mental patients. The act provided for the federal government to give a million acres of land to the Alaska Mental Health Trust to fund operations over a sustained period of time. Much of this land was later sold to private interests or converted to forest and park lands. To this day, there is an Alaska mental health system that still retains about 35% of the original federal property granted but it's run by the state of Alaska and not FEMA.
Let's look at a couple of other examples, those facilities listed for Minnesota. The connection between FEMA and Camp Ripley may not have anything to do with internment. There is a Minnesota Dept. of Corrections facility at Camp Ripley, but it's a low-level offender unit designed to take people sentenced to public service and has approximately 120 beds if the information I've read is current and correct. It's not run by FEMA but by the state of Minnesota. FEMA may have looked at Camp Ripley in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a place where quarters (empty barracks) were available to house displaced persons. They considered all sorts of places to put those people.
The Duluth Federal Prison Camp is for real and operated by the Bureau of Prisons, US Dept of Justice, not by FEMA. The term "camp" takes on negative overtones to some people, but in the language of the federal prison system, the designation "camp" just signifies that it's a facility for minimum security prisoners. So, they could take them out to a logging "camp" (or whatever) and the prisoners could work under minimum guard. Federal prison camps typically have limited or no perimeter fencing. The inmate population at FPC Duluth is around 900. There's no secret about FPC Duluth; you can read about it online.
Oh, and that FEMA concentration camp in Lansing, Michigan? It's a small fire station.
The list shows numerous "former WW2 POW camp" locations, but these were nearly all closed down and dismantled shortly after WW2. The exceptions are those locations where POW's were housed in buildings on larger military bases that were turned back over to the services for on-going use, such as training facilities, ROTC barracks, buildings used by the reserve components during AT, etc. But, I will add, that by now even most of these buildings have been torn down due to obsolescence.
Similarly, listing former WW2 Japanese internment camps is just ridiculous because I don't know of a single one of these that was retained for further use after WW2. These sites were all closed, buildings razed or sold, and the land disposed of or reverted to the BLM or Bureau of Reclamation.
There is federal land all over the country, much of it in the western US. Yes, any of it could conceivably be used to build a camp some day for some purpose, but 800 camps, fully-operational, sitting there waiting to be filled? Puh-leeze. The people that are banging the drum on this one just picked numerous present and former federal sites, and because they are (or were) federal, figure they could be FEMA internment camp sites. "We saw some lights pointed inward there"; so that means it's a concentration camp?
I'm thinking that it's giving FEMA (and the government in general) way, way too much credit for being organized enough to have this all in place and just sitting there waiting. FEMA can't even sell off their defective mobile homes that they stupidly bought after Katrina.
I'm certain that FEMA has all kinds of contingency plans for every kind of situation, including insurrection. Back in the late 1960's which is the time I entered the Army, there were plans to deal with the riots that had been sweeping the country. One of them was "Operation Garden Plot" (referred to in at least one of the websites that I visited while reading up on this subject). Garden Plot was and is simply an operations plan for federal authorities to provide assistance to the states, counties and municipalities for riot control. When I was at Fort Lost in the Woods, we had several cadre members who were on the roster for emergency response if needed via Garden Plot. By late 1969, the riots were mostly over and the peace demonstrations after that never got to be more than concerned authorities could handle without massive federal augmentation. No doubt Garden Plot plans had some component that included methods to house a potentially massive influx of detainees; at that time, they still had many more bases and surplus barracks than they do now. The base closures and realignments of the 90's and later divested the government of a great deal of their military property that could've been used for this purpose.
Some of the websites that deal with the subject of FEMA internment camps mention numerous "executive orders" that have been formulated to deprive citizens of their rights in an emergency. What they fail to mention is that most of these were written up during WW2 and were designed to be a contigency against any number of unforeseen events. They also fail to mention that most of these executive orders have since been rescinded or folded into similar orders that were consolidated under the Reagan administration. There are now addenda that add a requirement that such orders be carried out in compliance with guarantees provided under the US Constititution. Although not exactly comparable, this is one of the problems that the federal government is having with the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Now, having said that about presidential executive orders, it was one such order that sent all those Japanese US citizens and resident aliens to internment camps during WW2. I'm not going to argue against military security or the sentiment of the government of the day as to feeling the threat of imminent invasion of the west coast. That action does demonstrate that if the government wants to intern people en masse, they can and will do it. Of course, that was in the 1940's in a political and social climate when it was much easier for the government to trample on citizens' rights.
This whole "FEMA Internment Camp Conspiracy" hoax reminds me a lot of the big "Area 51 Conspiracy" of a decade or so ago. Yes, there was such a thing as Area 51, and it was ultra-high security. Some people got ahold of those two ideas and decided that something fishy must be going on there. Area 51 is a fairly remote location, and partly for that reason it was chosen for highly classified aeronautical research. Testing of the U-2, the SR-71, the "Stealth" generation of warplanes, and who knows what-all (that's why it's supposed to be secret) has taken place there. People believe what they want to believe, and the more fantastic it seems, the more it entertains and interests them. The private contractor security guards in camoflage fatigues without insignia only whetted the appetite of the conspiracy theorists looking for UFO secrets.
If we can discuss a loss of liberties in general, the most concrete recent examples of that occured under the Bush II administration as a result of 9-11. So what has the Obama administration really done in the past 200 days to limit our liberties? They've mostly been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, over-extending themselves. Much of the persecution that some people feel under the Obama administration is self-inflicted; it hasn't happened yet. My own personal feelings are that my rights were under more potential threat from Dick Cheney than they are under Obama.
Sean Hannity, certainly no liberal, has gone on the record as declaring the FEMA concentration camp story a hoax.
So I've just got to wonder, why do some of the extreme right-wing websites keep promoting this kind of hysteria when the story is so obviously false? I'll admit that our government is flawed, but why make things worse with information that isn't true? Is it for some kind of demented recognition? Maybe somebody has been watching re-runs of "Red Dawn" too many times.
On a right-wing website, I just reviewed the list of supposed locations of these places and it takes a vivid imagination for these right-wing groups to assert that that these camps are "active and fully staffed". The sites mentioned in the list that I personally know of are a joke. Tulelake California, site of a former internment camp of the Japanese in WW2? C'mon. The camp site was sold many, many years ago after the buildings were sold and moved or demolished. Yes, there is a wildlife refuge in the area and it, like any of the many other tens of millions of acres of federal land could be used as the site of an internment camp, but already built and fully staffed it certainly isn't. Same thing for Fort Ord, which is under re-development for mostly commercial purposes and the barracks have nearly all been demolished. The Army still uses an easterly chunk of what used to be Fort Ord, but there are very few buildings there. Terminal Island has had a federal prison located on it for decades, but it's on a small area of land fill surrounded on three sides by water and no way can accommodate a huge expansion of "FEMA detainees." Other sites listed as being in California are closed military bases where commercial redevelopment (or nothing) is going on and military buildings are being torn down.
One of the more preposterous examples is the "camp" in Alaska that is capable of receiving 500,000/2 million prisoners (the number depends on which website you visit). How somebody could come across a couple of facts and get the story so twisted contrary to what is real is beyond me. The reality behind this goes back to Congressional action on the Alaska Mental Health Act in the 1950's when Alaska was still a territory and had no territorial facilities to provide for care of mental patients. The act provided for the federal government to give a million acres of land to the Alaska Mental Health Trust to fund operations over a sustained period of time. Much of this land was later sold to private interests or converted to forest and park lands. To this day, there is an Alaska mental health system that still retains about 35% of the original federal property granted but it's run by the state of Alaska and not FEMA.
Let's look at a couple of other examples, those facilities listed for Minnesota. The connection between FEMA and Camp Ripley may not have anything to do with internment. There is a Minnesota Dept. of Corrections facility at Camp Ripley, but it's a low-level offender unit designed to take people sentenced to public service and has approximately 120 beds if the information I've read is current and correct. It's not run by FEMA but by the state of Minnesota. FEMA may have looked at Camp Ripley in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a place where quarters (empty barracks) were available to house displaced persons. They considered all sorts of places to put those people.
The Duluth Federal Prison Camp is for real and operated by the Bureau of Prisons, US Dept of Justice, not by FEMA. The term "camp" takes on negative overtones to some people, but in the language of the federal prison system, the designation "camp" just signifies that it's a facility for minimum security prisoners. So, they could take them out to a logging "camp" (or whatever) and the prisoners could work under minimum guard. Federal prison camps typically have limited or no perimeter fencing. The inmate population at FPC Duluth is around 900. There's no secret about FPC Duluth; you can read about it online.
Oh, and that FEMA concentration camp in Lansing, Michigan? It's a small fire station.
The list shows numerous "former WW2 POW camp" locations, but these were nearly all closed down and dismantled shortly after WW2. The exceptions are those locations where POW's were housed in buildings on larger military bases that were turned back over to the services for on-going use, such as training facilities, ROTC barracks, buildings used by the reserve components during AT, etc. But, I will add, that by now even most of these buildings have been torn down due to obsolescence.
Similarly, listing former WW2 Japanese internment camps is just ridiculous because I don't know of a single one of these that was retained for further use after WW2. These sites were all closed, buildings razed or sold, and the land disposed of or reverted to the BLM or Bureau of Reclamation.
There is federal land all over the country, much of it in the western US. Yes, any of it could conceivably be used to build a camp some day for some purpose, but 800 camps, fully-operational, sitting there waiting to be filled? Puh-leeze. The people that are banging the drum on this one just picked numerous present and former federal sites, and because they are (or were) federal, figure they could be FEMA internment camp sites. "We saw some lights pointed inward there"; so that means it's a concentration camp?
I'm thinking that it's giving FEMA (and the government in general) way, way too much credit for being organized enough to have this all in place and just sitting there waiting. FEMA can't even sell off their defective mobile homes that they stupidly bought after Katrina.
I'm certain that FEMA has all kinds of contingency plans for every kind of situation, including insurrection. Back in the late 1960's which is the time I entered the Army, there were plans to deal with the riots that had been sweeping the country. One of them was "Operation Garden Plot" (referred to in at least one of the websites that I visited while reading up on this subject). Garden Plot was and is simply an operations plan for federal authorities to provide assistance to the states, counties and municipalities for riot control. When I was at Fort Lost in the Woods, we had several cadre members who were on the roster for emergency response if needed via Garden Plot. By late 1969, the riots were mostly over and the peace demonstrations after that never got to be more than concerned authorities could handle without massive federal augmentation. No doubt Garden Plot plans had some component that included methods to house a potentially massive influx of detainees; at that time, they still had many more bases and surplus barracks than they do now. The base closures and realignments of the 90's and later divested the government of a great deal of their military property that could've been used for this purpose.
Some of the websites that deal with the subject of FEMA internment camps mention numerous "executive orders" that have been formulated to deprive citizens of their rights in an emergency. What they fail to mention is that most of these were written up during WW2 and were designed to be a contigency against any number of unforeseen events. They also fail to mention that most of these executive orders have since been rescinded or folded into similar orders that were consolidated under the Reagan administration. There are now addenda that add a requirement that such orders be carried out in compliance with guarantees provided under the US Constititution. Although not exactly comparable, this is one of the problems that the federal government is having with the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Now, having said that about presidential executive orders, it was one such order that sent all those Japanese US citizens and resident aliens to internment camps during WW2. I'm not going to argue against military security or the sentiment of the government of the day as to feeling the threat of imminent invasion of the west coast. That action does demonstrate that if the government wants to intern people en masse, they can and will do it. Of course, that was in the 1940's in a political and social climate when it was much easier for the government to trample on citizens' rights.
This whole "FEMA Internment Camp Conspiracy" hoax reminds me a lot of the big "Area 51 Conspiracy" of a decade or so ago. Yes, there was such a thing as Area 51, and it was ultra-high security. Some people got ahold of those two ideas and decided that something fishy must be going on there. Area 51 is a fairly remote location, and partly for that reason it was chosen for highly classified aeronautical research. Testing of the U-2, the SR-71, the "Stealth" generation of warplanes, and who knows what-all (that's why it's supposed to be secret) has taken place there. People believe what they want to believe, and the more fantastic it seems, the more it entertains and interests them. The private contractor security guards in camoflage fatigues without insignia only whetted the appetite of the conspiracy theorists looking for UFO secrets.
If we can discuss a loss of liberties in general, the most concrete recent examples of that occured under the Bush II administration as a result of 9-11. So what has the Obama administration really done in the past 200 days to limit our liberties? They've mostly been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, over-extending themselves. Much of the persecution that some people feel under the Obama administration is self-inflicted; it hasn't happened yet. My own personal feelings are that my rights were under more potential threat from Dick Cheney than they are under Obama.
Sean Hannity, certainly no liberal, has gone on the record as declaring the FEMA concentration camp story a hoax.
So I've just got to wonder, why do some of the extreme right-wing websites keep promoting this kind of hysteria when the story is so obviously false? I'll admit that our government is flawed, but why make things worse with information that isn't true? Is it for some kind of demented recognition? Maybe somebody has been watching re-runs of "Red Dawn" too many times.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Rush Limbaugh didn't invent talk radio
When I was a teenager living in Los Angeles in the 1960's, I used to listen to AM radio quite a bit at night. During that time, I often listened to a couple of stations, KABC and KLAC. Some of the personalities on those stations were Joe Pyne, Michael Jackson (no relation to the pop musician), Mort Sahl (the comedian), Joel Spivak, and others. These men all conducted talk radio shows which at the time were referred to as "two-way radio". Talk radio actually started before the 1960's on the east coast; some of the personalities involved with it came west after beginning their careers in the east.
One of my favorite radio talk show hosts of the 1960's was Joe Pyne. Pyne was a Marine Corps veteran of WW2. His on-air style was informative and argumentative. He didn't suffer fools gladly, and would often insult callers with phrases such as, "Ah, go gargle with razor blades" and "What's your point beside your head?" Basically a conservative, he would end his shows with the phrase, "Straight ahead and get Castro." He died in his forties of lung cancer at the height of his career in 1970.
Joe Pyne also had a TV show on KTTV in Los Angeles that was later nationally syndicated. You can look on Youtube and find video clips of a few of Joe Pyne's shows that were broadcast.
Anybody remember the American Nazi Party of the 1960's? The leader of the American Nazis was George Lincoln Rockwell. I don't know how serious Rockwell was about being a Nazi in America, but his timing for promoting the cause was somewhat off, as the 1960's were not particularly a time of economic turmoil. There was racial turmoil, and Rockwell later made some political hay out of that. Nevertheless, the American Nazis never had more than a few dozen actual members and perhaps a few hundred sympathyzers.
Joe Pyne used to have ripe comments re. the American Nazis, whom he called "American Nutsies". Their leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, he called "George Stinkin' Ratwell".
One of my favorite radio talk show hosts of the 1960's was Joe Pyne. Pyne was a Marine Corps veteran of WW2. His on-air style was informative and argumentative. He didn't suffer fools gladly, and would often insult callers with phrases such as, "Ah, go gargle with razor blades" and "What's your point beside your head?" Basically a conservative, he would end his shows with the phrase, "Straight ahead and get Castro." He died in his forties of lung cancer at the height of his career in 1970.
Joe Pyne also had a TV show on KTTV in Los Angeles that was later nationally syndicated. You can look on Youtube and find video clips of a few of Joe Pyne's shows that were broadcast.
Anybody remember the American Nazi Party of the 1960's? The leader of the American Nazis was George Lincoln Rockwell. I don't know how serious Rockwell was about being a Nazi in America, but his timing for promoting the cause was somewhat off, as the 1960's were not particularly a time of economic turmoil. There was racial turmoil, and Rockwell later made some political hay out of that. Nevertheless, the American Nazis never had more than a few dozen actual members and perhaps a few hundred sympathyzers.
Joe Pyne used to have ripe comments re. the American Nazis, whom he called "American Nutsies". Their leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, he called "George Stinkin' Ratwell".
Here's what California gave her Vietnam veterans for services rendered...
A stinkin' sign by the side of a highway next to a bridge they were already going to build.
Quite a few states showed their appreciation for services rendered by Vietnam veterans by granting them a cash bonus. It wasn't a big deal, typically $100 to $300. California never saw fit to give her Vietnam veterans such a bonus. There were more KIA's in Vietnam from California than any other state. By virtue of population, it's probably the same situation with the number of Vietnam veterans as a whole. I'm sure the California state legislature didn't miss this fact if they were even inclined to mull over the possibility of a bonus. I can get a mental picture of those esteemed statesmen (behind closed doors, of course). "Well, we have this bridge we have to replace anyway. Let's call it the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge, then buy a $400 road sign, put it by the bridge, and that will cover it." Mind you, this was long before the current fiscal crisis in the state.
There is a California Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was built in 1984. It isn't very large and is located on a corner of the state capitol grounds in Sacramento. I hasten to point out that its cost of around 2.5 million dollars was put up by private donations, and not from any funds from the State of California.
I mention this not only out of bitterness, but as a prediction that the same will transpire for our current veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. Some other states already have bonuses in place for these veterans; California does not and will probably repeat their pattern of parsimony and neglect toward veterans by ignoring it. They can always come up with money for free medical care for illegal aliens, but not for a veterans bonus.
Why the Button Fly?
My travels today took me down to the Fort Lewis area. My, what a lot of activity is going on around there. When I think back on the Clinton years, it was less busy. Anyway, when I'm in the area, I sometimes stop in the shops off-post to see what's for sale. There are a number of shops in Ponders (pawn shops) and Tillicum (so-called "surplus" stores) that are possible sources of funds for skint soldiers. When soldiers run out of money, they sell stuff. Re. the misnamed "surplus" stores, I say this because they really don't sell items that they bought as surplus from the government. They sell stuff that soldiers bring in to them. Soldiers bring things in to sell to the stores to get cash money. The stores turn around and resell the stuff for more money, mostly to other soldiers. Some of the stuff that the soldiers bring in to sell isn't theirs. That's putting it kindly, isn't it?
So, I look around in these stores just to see what kinds of things soldiers use these days. My oh my, they have all kinds of fancy little gadgets and gear that was undreamed of during my time in the Army. They use a number of little pouches, straps, and other things I couldn't identify. Most of it isn't cheap, either. As a lowly example, the Army makes a much nicer pair of socks to wear with boots now, but new ones cost $14 a pair. These socks actually have elastic in the tops that works and holds them up. The old Army issue socks had uppers that would stretch out on their first washing, forever after falling down to your ankles inside your boots.
I also looked at the "new" Army fatigue uniform with the digital camoflage pattern. These are called "ACU's" for Army Combat Uniform. The shirts don't have a real collar, but they do have a nice heavy zipper on the front instead of buttons, closed up with a couple of Velcro pads.
When it comes to zippers, I have this great, big question for the Army uniform design people. I'm sure they researched all this, but still I have to wonder. Why do they still make fatigue trousers with the button fly arrangement? Would very many people disagree that a zipper is far easier and faster to use, both important attributes at times for soldiers?? Maybe the uniform engineers think that a zipper isn't as sturdy under strenuous use as buttons on the fly. Well, the jungle fatigue trousers I wore in Vietnam in 1970-72 all had zippers, and never did one blow out. The heavy-duty zipper on the new ACU shirt would find a nice home on the trousers; it's a much nicer zipper than the crappy one we had on jungle fatigues which was like those found on a cheap pair of civilian slacks. Our OD stateside fatigues had zipper flies in them, too, but when the army came out with the woodland camo BDU's in the early 1980's, a step backward in time was taken when these were made with the button fly. Well, if it was good enough in WW1, I guess it's good enough now.
So, I look around in these stores just to see what kinds of things soldiers use these days. My oh my, they have all kinds of fancy little gadgets and gear that was undreamed of during my time in the Army. They use a number of little pouches, straps, and other things I couldn't identify. Most of it isn't cheap, either. As a lowly example, the Army makes a much nicer pair of socks to wear with boots now, but new ones cost $14 a pair. These socks actually have elastic in the tops that works and holds them up. The old Army issue socks had uppers that would stretch out on their first washing, forever after falling down to your ankles inside your boots.
I also looked at the "new" Army fatigue uniform with the digital camoflage pattern. These are called "ACU's" for Army Combat Uniform. The shirts don't have a real collar, but they do have a nice heavy zipper on the front instead of buttons, closed up with a couple of Velcro pads.
When it comes to zippers, I have this great, big question for the Army uniform design people. I'm sure they researched all this, but still I have to wonder. Why do they still make fatigue trousers with the button fly arrangement? Would very many people disagree that a zipper is far easier and faster to use, both important attributes at times for soldiers?? Maybe the uniform engineers think that a zipper isn't as sturdy under strenuous use as buttons on the fly. Well, the jungle fatigue trousers I wore in Vietnam in 1970-72 all had zippers, and never did one blow out. The heavy-duty zipper on the new ACU shirt would find a nice home on the trousers; it's a much nicer zipper than the crappy one we had on jungle fatigues which was like those found on a cheap pair of civilian slacks. Our OD stateside fatigues had zipper flies in them, too, but when the army came out with the woodland camo BDU's in the early 1980's, a step backward in time was taken when these were made with the button fly. Well, if it was good enough in WW1, I guess it's good enough now.
Friday, July 31, 2009
My First Day in the Army
Basic trainees getting their gear together before formation.
Me standing in the company street of my Basic Training unit, B-1-1, at Fort Ord in 1969.
Actually, my first day and night. I enlisted in the Army and was given a reporting date of April 28, 1969. On that day, I presented myself to the Los Angeles Entrance and Examination Station (AFEES) for formal enlistment into the Regular Army. At this facility, they processed enlistees and draftees at the same time. Here we filled out forms, took a few tests, took the oath, and were given a (cursory) physical examination. It doesn't sound like much, but it took all day. This building was a big, old-fashioned office building with ceilings in all the rooms as high was the rooms were wide. There were different colored lines painted on the floor directing you to go to this or that place. Sometime during the middle of the day, we were given a meal ticket and told to get our lunch at a restaurant across the street. I wonder how many guys took that opportunity to disappear??
During this process, the enlistment aspect never let up. The Army had offices in the AFEES where they would snag enlistees and inductees out of the line based on initial test scores that demonstrated specific aptitudes. For example, if your test score for the ALAT (Army Language Aptitude Test) was above a certain number, they hauled you in to talk to an ASA (Army Security Agency) recruiter. My ALAT score was above the specified number, so I went this route. I was taken into an office where an old, owlish-looking E-7 sat behind a desk. This crew-cut fellow in GI-issue gray plastic glasses gave me the pitch about what an honor it would be for me to serve in the ASA, which was an elite outfit that was charged with protecting certain aspects of national security, blah, blah, blah. The bottom line was, I would have to add another year to my enlistment for this privilege. Well, I hadn't been in the Army for a full day yet, but even at that early juncture, I just knew that I did not want to add another year to my enlistment. I declined. Late, I found out that the ASA duty wasn’t exactly James Bond level excitement. It was mostly about communications security that consisted of electronics monitoring, including internal spying on Army elements.
After all the paperwork and other bush-wah was finished, they collected us in one large hall and for the first time, they separated the enlistees from the inductees (draftees). There was only a low partition about four feet tall in the center of the hall that divided the two lots from each other. After while, these two men in funny uniforms consisting of a khaki shirt and royal blue trousers walked stiffly into the room on the other side of the partition. In a loud voice, one of these men said, "Listenup...willthefollowingnamedindividualsstandup" (said as if it was all one word). Two men stood up after their names were called. Then the leather-lungs who called off the names said, "Congratulations, gennulmen. YouhavejustbeeninductedintotheUnitedStatesMarineCorps." Out of what must have been a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty men, two of them had been selected to do their two year involuntary military service in the USMC; the rest went into the Army.
At what what I thought would be the end of a very long work day, they loaded us onto Greyhound buses and shipped us to Fort Ord, California for Basic Combat Training (BCT), sometimes called “Boot Camp”. The buses drove up Highway 101 to Salinas, and turned left for Fort Ord. I don't know what time we got there, but it was in the early morning hours of the next day. Before we were dispatched to our BCT companies, we first had to in-process with the Army. That started when we got off the bus. We were herded into a small wood-frame WW2-era building to fill out a new battery of paperwork. To accomplish this, we were given a #2 pencil without eraser. One kid in the group held up his hand with a question, and when given permission, asked, "Sergeant, can I have an eraser? I made a mistake and need to fix it." The cadre soldier up in front who was taking us through this process didn't bat an eye and said, "Son, you're in the Army now. We don't make mistakes in the Army, so we don't need erasers." It didn't take me long to find out just how ironic and cruel this statement was. I have to think the Army in contemporary times is a better organization, but during the time I was in, it seemed like mistakes were the order of the day, not the exception. I used to laugh when I would see those "Zero Defects" signs decorating office walls. It could have been described as organized chaos.
Finally around 0400 (that's four o'clock in the morning for civilians), we were led away to the USARECSTA, or US Army Reception Station. The Reception Station was charged with getting the new trainess organized before they went to their BCT company where they received their actual training. While in the Reception Station, they issued uniforms, gave haircuts, administered more tests, gave innoculations, and kept trainees in a holding pattern until they formed up enough men for a company cycle. This is also the place where the first misfits were winnowed out. It's true, some men couldn't even make it through the first few days of Army life before the training even started. It's no wonder; after bedding down at 0400, we found out that our work day started up again at 0500 hours - after getting maybe one hour of sleep. That's certainly no way to win the hearts of brand-new solders, but it was the Army way.
I had gotten sick a couple of days before my reporting date, and was still ill on the actual day. Talk about a misguided work ethic. I went ahead, and was still ill the first few days after I arrived at Fort Ord. With the short rest hours and the burst of exertion, it was a trial. I should have taken that as an omen at the time, that fate was trying to tell me something.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Harassment and Gender Bias in the Workplace
My daughter Annie recently has had a horrible employment experience. She has been employed as a veterinary tech. at a clinic for the past nearly three years, working her way up. Recently, her boss asked her to take on a higher-level, more demanding position which she agreed to do. He asked her what she had to have for pay, she stated an amount, and he readily agreed. Lately, he came to her and said, "I must have been out of my mind to agree to pay you that amount. You're just a 24-year-old girl and you're not worth that amount of money." Whereupon she said, "Okay, I'll go back to my old job and rate of pay, but I will not do the additional management work that you agreed to pay me more to do." We think that he figured he could get her to do the extra work at the old rate of pay. After that, her employer turned her situation into what is called a "hostile work environment" by harassing her verbally. She still refused to quit, so he fired her without a basis for cause. He would not give her a letter stating the reasons for her termination. There's a lot more to this story, but this employer has a history of gender bias, verbal harassment, falsification of documents and other nasty habits. Annie is pretty feisty, and I think this time her now-former employer has picked on the wrong blue-eyed, 115 pound feline gorilla. She has found an attorney to take on her case on the basis of wrongful termination, harassment, gender bias, and some other things. She is out to punish her former employer the only way it counts, by taking money away from him and hoping that it will discourage such behavior in the future for other employees.
When people work for a large outfit, like an airplane company, or a public employer like the government, they have human resources offices (we used to call them a "personnel office") that monitors misbehavior on the part of employees and managers, and it's a place where you can take legimate problems for rectification. On the other hand, when a person works for a small, private business, if they have problems of the sort I describe above, they're on your own. If you're dealing with an unreasonable boss in the first place, it's doubtful you're going to make any headway with them on your own after things go sour.
I have three children, one son and two daughters. I want all of my children to be happy and successful. It's just beyond my comprehension how some of the other societies place low values on daughters. I'm thinking of places like Japan, China, the Arab countries, and so on where women count for less than men in general, and daughters take a distant back seat. What's wrong with those men who they don't want the same amount of success and happiness in life for their daughters as they do for their sons!??
When people work for a large outfit, like an airplane company, or a public employer like the government, they have human resources offices (we used to call them a "personnel office") that monitors misbehavior on the part of employees and managers, and it's a place where you can take legimate problems for rectification. On the other hand, when a person works for a small, private business, if they have problems of the sort I describe above, they're on your own. If you're dealing with an unreasonable boss in the first place, it's doubtful you're going to make any headway with them on your own after things go sour.
I have three children, one son and two daughters. I want all of my children to be happy and successful. It's just beyond my comprehension how some of the other societies place low values on daughters. I'm thinking of places like Japan, China, the Arab countries, and so on where women count for less than men in general, and daughters take a distant back seat. What's wrong with those men who they don't want the same amount of success and happiness in life for their daughters as they do for their sons!??
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