Yes I did NOT wear a mask for the whole ride unless it was at the Market or at the malingerers oops I mean the Doctors Office. And guess what!?! I was’nt sick the whole time! What a surprise, huh!?! Grumpy
Author: Grumpy
Everyone already knows that Columbus was a literal Hitler from the 15th century and that all woke people celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. But what you may not know is that there is a proper way to celebrate the holiday.
It shouldn’t have to be said but if you celebrate IPD by getting drunk and wearing a mariachi hat, you’re doing it wrong. Save that noise for fake indigenous holidays like Cinco de Mayo.
You could raze your city to the ground if it’s named after a colonizer, but the real way to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day is by sacrificing one of your neighbors, preferably someone deep in debt and no prospects of paying it off (eg college grad with a gender studies degree).
California cities will be setting the bar high this year with Governor Gavin Newsom acting as chief priest doing the majority of the slaying.
“Human sacrifice is nothing new to me,” Gov. Newsom, who is a ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood, said. “I’m just new to wearing all that feather headdress stuff.”
While most Aztec sacrifices were made to the god of war, woke Californians will be sacrificing these poor saps to the climate god. There will be icons of Greta Thunberg surrounding the altar.
Originally published October 11, 2019.
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Scrome J4F1: Scoping the FAMAS
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A lost world
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Will it be the end of “sir” and “ma’am”? (Lance Cpl. Dakota Dodd/Marine Corps)
A new academic report on efforts to integrate Marine Corps boot camp recommends dropping gender-specific salutations for drill instructors, but service leaders are not convinced they want to take that step.
The lengthy report, commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and completed in 2022, points out that half of the military services already have done away with gendered identifiers for training staff.
“The Army, Navy, and Coast Guard effectively de-emphasize gender in an integrated environment,” the report states. “Instead of saying ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir,’ recruits in these Services refer to their drill instructors using their ranks or roles followed by their last names. Gendered identifiers prime recruits to think about or visually search for a drill instructor’s gender first, before their rank or role.”
The proposal was under consideration by a Marine Corps leadership team assembled to guide service efforts to integrate boot camp, Col. Howard Hall, chief of staff for Marine Corps Training and Education Command, told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in December.
But, he said, leaders had concerns.
“That’s going to take some effort,” Hall told the committee during its quarterly public meeting Dec. 6 in Arlington, Virginia. “Honestly, that’s not a quick fix. What are inculcating in our young recruits that will or will not be reinforced when they graduate and enter the fleet Marine force? So again, we want to avoid any quick-fix solutions that introduce perturbations down the line.”
The University of Pittsburgh report highlights a number of ways ― subtle and not-so-subtle ― that Marine Corps boot camp centers male recruits and makes male Marines the standard. Three of the five sections of service history taught at boot camp contain no explicit mention of female Marines, and “core values” guided discussions exclusively highlight the stories of male Marines and sailors when giving examples of real-world heroism and leadership.
These examples paint a picture of a Marine Corps in transition.
The Corps still has the smallest percentage of female service members, and until 2019 all female recruits were trained in a single battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina. Women now train at both Marine Corps boot camps, but training materials have been slow to catch up to that reality.
The study found, for example, that PowerPoint slides from Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego describing service leadership traits still used all male pronouns: “A leader who is confident in his decisions instills confidence in his Marines.”
Learning sessions about marriage in the military routinely featured images of husbands in uniform and civilian wives, the study found.
Regarding Marine recruits’ treatment of drill instructors, anecdotes suggested female training staff members, even senior ones, were sometimes treated as less important or authoritative than male counterparts. One male drill instructor told interviewers that he saw a female chief drill instructor, who commanded an entire recruit series, standing ignored on the parade deck as other drill instructors asked for advice from a male peer.
The study’s authors suggest that dispensing with “sir” and “ma’am” in favor of the neutral “drill instructor” would help to counteract that behavior.
“Gender-neutral identifiers are an unambiguous, impartial way to circumvent these issues,” the authors write. “Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord. By teaching recruits to use gender-neutral identifiers for their drill instructors, Services underscore the importance of respecting authoritative figures regardless of gender.”
Hall said the Marine Corps was working to change the training materials highlighted by the University of Pittsburgh study, but expressed concern about making any moves that would put boot camp practices out of step with fleet ones.
“All of a sudden, we change something at recruit training, and recruits start coming in and using a different identifier. It’s not something we would change overnight,” he told Marine Corps Times following the advisory committee meeting. “Again, we’ve got a history of ‘sir, ma’am, sir, ma’am. If we change something at the root level, how do we make the corresponding change at the Fleet Marine Force? So it’s not ours to implement alone.”
The gender identifiers proposal was one of a half-dozen recommendations the Marines’ entry-level training advisory council is now considering. It’s not clear when the service will decide which ones to pursue.
Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning investigative and enterprise reporter covering the U.S. military and national defense. The former managing editor of Military.com, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, USA Today and Popular Mechanics.
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The cost in the Ukraine
I snapped this picture in the waiting room at my clinic. These friable acoustic
ceiling tiles are absolutely everywhere. We generally don’t think much about them until there’s nothing else about which to think.
So, I’m sitting here alone in the semi-darkness, staring at those institutional ceiling tiles wearing one of those absurd open-backed surgical gowns. It is blue with a faded flower print. Who made that decision?
I’m patiently awaiting a minor medical procedure. It really isn’t a big deal. I’ve been clearing my throat a lot and asked a colleague to take a peek inside just to make sure there wasn’t something we could do about it. My wife calls it my moose call. It is worse after meals and is justifiably annoying for those around me.
The possibility I might die from this is fairly small. There is some anesthesia involved. However, I rather suspect that statistically speaking, the really dangerous bit was the drive to the clinic. The possibility of my buddy coming back to tell me he found something truly horrible is also fairly minuscule. But that is not the case with everybody in this building today. It also will not always be the case with me.
I have faced my own death before. At some point, if I feel really froggy, I’ll share the details with you guys. I was a soldier, and soldiering is innately dangerous. I have also had five people die in my arms. That’s the sort of thing to make a guy wax introspective. But back to those ceiling tiles …
Those things are everywhere. Dropped ceilings are all the rage in institutional settings. When I worked on the psych ward in residency, the facility sported two sequential locked doors, like a prison. In theory, you couldn’t get in or out without clearing each barrier in order, but they still outfitted the place with those dropped ceilings replete with ceiling tiles.
One young man took it as a challenge to elope from the place. He told us as much. And then, one evening, he just vanished. It was pretty amazing. They reviewed the security footage, but the kid was just gone. As they say, the authorities were vexed.
The following day one of the elderly patients complained that a little monkey had scampered out of the ceiling and eaten her breakfast. At first, everyone just wrote that off as some mystical combination of her rarefied mental illness, advanced age and her sparkling personality. And then somebody thought about that little missing dude. You guessed it; he had been hiding in the ceiling overnight. I am still amazed he found someplace comfortable enough to tolerate the experience.
Think back to the last time you had to endure something ghastly at the dentist. Perhaps you had a tooth extracted, a cavity filled, or a canal rooted. I recall the last time that happened to me. I was staring at those institutional ceiling tiles and wishing I could be absolutely anywhere but there. How about if we took that to the next level?
They call it the Big Blue Marble. Our time on this lovely little
ball is limited. It behooves us all to think a bit about that.
I once toured the death house at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The facility was constructed by the inmates and was configured to accommodate lethal injection as the method de mortis. It was an utterly fascinating place.
The room itself was covered on the inside with soundproof material and sported two walls comprised of one-way mirrors — one for the victim’s family and the other for government witnesses. How does one get invited to something like that? Would anyone think ill of you if you respectfully declined? Does anybody ever do so?
I realized at the time I would likely never have the opportunity again, presupposing that I successfully resisted the urge to kill anybody, so I resolved to maximize the experience. The table was built like a cross with heavy leather tie-down straps. I climbed up on it and spread my arms out on the thing just to see how it felt. The table was hard. Apparently, Uncle Sam saw little need to waste resources on comfort given the circumstances.
As I reclined onto that table and imagined the dark circumstances surrounding their using it for real, I was struck by those ubiquitous acoustic ceiling tiles. The corner of one of them was cut away to admit a small microphone. The condemned got three minutes to speak before the warden departed the room. In such an institutional setting, when you die, you die alone.
The bottom line is that those benign unremarkable ceiling tiles play witness to some awfully profound human drama. They adorn my own medical office as well as that of my dentist. The trauma bays in the big urban medical center where I learned my craft sported them as well. That was the most dramatic place I had ever imagined. There is literally no telling how many people died horribly staring at those things.
Our sojourn on this odd blue orb is, by definition, time-limited. Everybody dies. Sometimes it is quick; other times, it takes a while. If you could tolerate a little unsolicited advice, if you haven’t already, you need to get right with God. The time to think about that for the first time is not when you are staring desperately up at those blasted ceiling tiles.
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WHAT!?!
