You WANT to die on this hill..?

 My Bride and the Girl are still in Teacher Strike Stasis, waiting to see if the two sides will settle today.

As I think I said earlier, the union has repeatedly climbed down from its initial (eminently reasonable!) list of objectives because the cheapskate state legislature made it clear that it's more important to hand out tax breaks to gajillionaires than to pay for 21st Century education for everyone.

The final obstacle to settlement is this: "class size committees".

Since the State of Oregon can't be arsed to pay for enough teachers or educational assistants to bring class sizes down to a reasonable level, the proposed "solutions" are to 1) pay teachers more for doing crowd control over those teeming hordes, and 2) refer the worst of the scrums to a committee at each school if the horde gets to be just too huge.

Per the link, this committee will "...negotiate how to resolve class sizes or student loads that exceed agreed-upon limits if the principal, the affected teacher or teachers and a representative of the union don’t agree on a solution."

The union and the district both agree to this thing. What they disagree on is how it should work.

For one, the district wants to appeal process to stay in-house. The union wants to be able to rope in a state-level mediator if they don't agree with the district superintendant's ruling,

For my money? I wouldn't trust the Supe, either. I'm stickin' with the union there.

But the other big disagreement?

Parents.

"Under the union’s proposal, the class size committees could include two parents if school administrators and the teachers union agree to add them."

The district didn't want Joey's mom and Andie's dad, but eventually gave in on the parents. But they want to restrict what the parents (and these committees) can do: "The committees would not be allowed to discuss and make recommendations about class size issues in specific classrooms but would instead be limited to collaborating on potential solutions regarding class sizes and caseloads at their school more generally."

So I get that the primary reason the teachers proposed this is to get public support. They look more parent-friendly if they're pushing for parent involvement.

But, c'mon. Seriously?

You have to deal with these people, teachers. Are you telling me with a straight face that you don't know who is most likely to end up on these committees?

The crank. The obsessive. A Mom For Liberty, a Dad for Anti-Vaxx, and every other socio-edu-political whackadoodle out there in every school intake area.

Oh, fine, okay. Maybe not every parent...but you know who you're most likely to end up with, right, teachers?

And you want that?

Here I just finished ranting about how in the international news governments and "statesmen" are running around wanting things that are stupid things and making plans that are stupid plans...and right here on my street there's...this.

I have no idea how the union and the district will resolve this mess.

But that they started here? That they want this goofy thing?

That's...not particularly encouraging.

Pause in Operations

I'm working on a Battles piece for Yarmouk (636 CE) - which is already way too long for the source material - but have hit a rock and can't finish up until I get my hands on more reference material.

Because there's an issue with the sources.

The Wikipedia article, standard starting point for any Internet-centric research, appears above the usual standard; well-researched, detailed, and well written. So much so that I almost binned the idea of writing this one up and turning to Frontiers 1914.

Being me, I went ahead and started pulling up as many of the primary sources as I could and ran into a real head-scratcher; nobody else I could find, and I mean NObody, provided the level of detail for the fight that characterized the Wiki article. Primary, secondary, both...nobody was saying the same stuff.

Quite the opposite, in fact; many secondary sources' central thesis was "we just really don't know exactly what happened because the primary accounts don't say or are contradictory".

Now the author(s) of the Wikipedia piece seem to have leaned heavily on the work of David Nicolle, specifically his 2000 Osprey title "Yarmuk 636 AD". So presumably Nicolle has the goods - and if he does I'm guessing they come from the primary source I cannot for love or money find on-line; the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH work The History of Damascus (Arabic: تاريخ دمشق, Tarikh Dimashq) attributed to Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر). 

If the stuff in the Wiki is right, it almost has to come from our boy Ibn Asakir; I've got the other major Arabic works (and the other side of the hill, the Byzantines, produced little of value I've found) and neither the Kitab Futuh al-Sham nor the Futuh al-Buldan say anything remotely close to or as detailed as the tactical-level detail in the Wiki.

I've got Nicolle on order, but it's not due in for another week or two. Until then I'm forced to suspend operations on Yarmuk.

Speaking of suspending operations.

The Fire Direction Center is unusually well-staffed right now because the employer (in one form or another) of half the staff, Portland Public Schools, is on strike.

Normally you'd think an old lefty like me would be stickin' to the union and, yes, I have a lot of sympathy there for a couple of reasons.

First, because the union position makes a lot of sense. Smaller class sizes, more prep time, increased staffing for stuff like Special Ed. Even the wage demands aren't whopping out of line given the cost of living her in Portland proper. This ain't fucking Idaho.

Second, because the District has fucked this up five ways and Sunday. They've been imitating the worst habits of higher ed, staffing up the Head Shed and shafting the troops, and then bullshitting the line dogs about that. This spring as they handed a raise to the assistant vice-superintendants with which Big Pink (the District HQ) teems they axed damn near all the lowly Educational Assistants over at my Bride's workplace.

That's just stupid.

But.

Here's my problem; the District's base position - that there's just no money for all the teachers' asks - isn't really wrong.

The State of Oregon has been chronically underfunding public schools for decades. A lot of that goes back to the anti-tax Eighties, when scumbags like Don McIntyre roamed the Oregon Earth like fatheaded dinosaurs, conning the gullible Public into cutting taxes to make sure Phil Knight could afford a second airplane.

A lot more goes to the ridiculous way that funding is allocated.

The state took over public school funding in the wake of lawsuits that pointed out - correctly - that basing school funding on county property taxes was inherently unfair and unequal. Poor people living in shit places had no money to begin with, so their schools were shit, and their kids ended up poor. Rich people? Not so much.

But then the state turned around and handed the money out on a headcount flat rate.

Every kid in your classroom got you, say, $4,000 a year. Yeah, there were some extras, including Federal dollars from stuff like Title 1, but the big slug came from the state general fund.

You see the problem there?

That's not that much better than the old system. The nice well-bred white kids in Lake Oswego get four grand each and are then backed up by Mummy and Daddy's money and tutoring and camps and enrichment and fuck-all else.

The poor kids in Southeast Portland?

Yeah.

And even within a single district that's a problem. The nice wealthy enclaves that feed high schools like Portland Public's Grant and Lincoln and (what-I-still-think-of-as-Wilson) Wells do just fine on the base handouts. 

The feeders for our daughter's Roosevelt, or Jefferson? Given their huge population of poor kids and English-as-a-Second-Language-kids and kids with family problems and learning issues?

So ideally places like Jefferson and Roosevelt and their feeder junior highs and elementary schools would be on a "base x 1.3". And real snakepits (Hi, George Middle School!) would be on a "base x 1.5" that would provide the extra staffing and teaching (and social work and community support) they'd need to help get those kids through K-12 and out with something like a 21st Century education.

So ideally both sides of this strike - District and teachers - should be on one side of the picket line and the State government on the other. The solution isn't in rearranging the deck chairs; it's in rebuilding the fucking boat.

But that risks getting the Oregon Taxpayer - that skittish, ignorant, tightfisted sonofabitch - worked into a snit.

The GQP, of course, will fire off every flare in the "taxes are theft" pyro locker, because they hate non-Jesus schools anyway.

And the Richie Riches who pay most of (but not really enough of) the taxes will squeal like piggies in a sty because their money is going to Those People, when government's only job is to keep Them far enough away from Us so that we don't have to deal with Them.

(see: "Homeless Crisis").

So the problem is that there's no obvious solution to the strike between the striking parties. To get there requires Oregon to choose to put money into poor people and brown people (and troubled people) and the nice wealthy white untroubled people who HAVE the money would sooner eat dirt.

WASF.

That's cheery, isn't it? Yeah, and I'm not even going to get started on fucking Gaza.

Lemme see if I can end with something cheeery.

Oh, yeah; these came in the mail:

I ran into this little manhwa (the Korean version of what in Japan would be called "manga", a serial comic) several years back and was utterly delighted.

It's a silly and funny isekai-type romance; our heroine (who's kind of a glum college student IRL) is in proper fantasy fashion somehow transported into the world of her favorite bodice-ripping novel...but as one of the minor characters.

Which is just as well, because the protagonist - the eponymous "Duke" - is kind of scary and obsessive about the heroine. So our girl Ripley - at least, now shes "Ripley", the redhead in the picture - just decides to get drunk and have fun at the party scene she's emerged into. Which is fine....

Until she wakes up in bed with Scary Duke Zeronis, the two of them having just had both of their "first night" (which Ripley has no conscious memory of - girl, you gotta know when to stop drinking!) and thus, at least to the Duke, having plighted their troth and consummated their bond and become mates and holy shit is she in trouble now.

Anyway...our heroine desperately tries to find ways to convince her new inamorato that She's Not The Girl He's Looking For...but in ways that don't trigger his touchy pride. 

And he, meanwhile, is being slowly gentled and broadened by this red-headed whacko by whom he's being led around.

It's all very cute and funny and sometimes touching and mostly just vastly entertaining.

The Webtoons site went sorta dark after the end of the online series; sometimes the stories do that - my guess it's related to where the artist/writer is hoping to sell a print version like this. So I had been stymied when I'd hoped to re-read some of my favorite bits.

Until now! So, yay!

Something to curl up with now that the rains have returned. At east until Nicolle shows up.

And speaking of things showing up in the mail, this:

I think I mentioned that one of my retirement hobbies is returning to a sport I played decades ago, the Japanese fencing called kendo.

I'm not very good, mind. My body is damaged and so I'm both slow and clumsy. Small children can beat me.

But it's not about winning; it's the discipline and training, trying to be the best kendoka I can be.

The thing in the center of the photo is a shinai; a wooden "sword" made from bamboo staves used to practice the parts that involve actually hitting people.

(There's a different sort of wooden sword, called a bokken or bokuto, that's actually shaped like a katana, the "samurai sword" you think of when you think of this stuff.)

The bamboo version is supposedly the result of an Edo-period sensei trying to come up with a way of training sword-fighting that didn't involve clubbing the living shit out of students with a heavy wooden stick.

When I picked the sport back up a year ago I dug up my old shinai from back in the Nineties. It was a bit dry but still serviceable, quite the tribute to the makers, whoever they were.

But the poor thing is getting worn out with new use. So I finally retired it and got a replacement.

It feels very new and lush after my old stick. Now I just need to do all the sanding and oiling and suchlike that you're supposed to do to prepare for simulated combat.

Somehow the idea that you have to break down something brand new and fiddle with it to make it work right seems very old and "traditional", so properly kendo, which is about as "old and traditional" as it gets.

So I've got to break out the sandpaper and furniture oil and sit down with it. Very satisfying in a sort of tactile way. Go figure; I'm just like that.

Now if I can just recall the sequence of the Bokuto Ni Yoru Kendo Kihon-waza Keiko-ho...

Straining at bullets, swallowing glaciers

A friend of mine linked to this video:

Fighting Back Against A School Shooter

Fighting back against a school shooter:

Posted by TheBlaze on Monday, March 7, 2016

It's apparently a clip from a much longer training film that argues for a more active, aggressive defense against school shooters.

And y'know what? In a perfect world I'd be all about this.

For one thing, the whole "duck and cover" response to danger kind of pisses me off. Run away? Fine. Fight? If you want to. But cowering in hopes of being overlooked? Seems like a pretty miserable way to die, if that's how you're gonna go.

But.

We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we have to make choices about how we spend our resources.

And I have two problems with this little video.

First of all, it's a school shooter video. It assumes from the jump that school shooters are a thing, a horrible, omnipresent, immediate, clear-and-present danger thing that must be aggressively confronted. I talked this to fucking death damn near ten years ago, but as horrible as the cable news people try and make it, the simple fact is that mass murder just isn't that big a threat in the US in 2016. IT's not like dying of dysentery was on the Oregon Trail back in the day.

You're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to be killed by a madman with a gun in your school, kids. Seriously; Uncle Chief has done the math. Turns out that about 14 kids a year get squarshed by those ol' yella-dog buses. But about 297 people total - that's adults AND kids - got shot in school between 1980 and 2012 when Sandy Hook brought the whole "school shooter" thing back into fashion. That's about 9.3 people a year; the third of a person was either a really little kid or possibly a Donald Trump voter, but, whatever.

So throwing a lot of money at school shootings is like throwing money at ballistic missile defense or alien invasions; not a good return-on-investment thing.

Second of all, while it looks and feels nice, I think it completely mistakes the point of the "lockdown huddle".

The trainer of the video assumes that the point of the huddle is "protection" or something. He's right...assuming that the "main problem" is trying to cut down the casualty count and not actually control the kids' panic.

If I had a bunch of troops I had confidence in, and felt were both cool-headed and trusted each other I'd use his methods. My problem would be that...that's what I'd do with trained, confident troops. I'd trust them to stay still and silent until they had to take aggressive action. That's what good troops do in an ambush drill, which is basically what this is; a plan to ambush the shooter.

My problem would be that if I didn't trust my troops, or trust them to trust each other, spreading them out makes it much more difficult for 1) them to combat their own panic and 2) me to control them and prevent them from doing something panicky and dangerous.

So spreading them out makes it MUCH more likely that the most panicked one will bolt for the door and try to escape, or start screaming and crying, thus both alerting the nutter that we're there in the room and, possibly, unlocking the door for him.

It's a great idea, but it requires a HELL of a lot of training and a really high level of confidence and aggression in the kids.

Meaning that to do this successfully you'd have to...you knew it, right; spend a hell of a lot of time and money training kids and teachers to do this.

It seems to me that for some reason We the People are more and more inclined to do this stuff; worry and fret ridiculously about madman bullets, tiny, horrible problems that have a miniscule probability of harming us...while ignoring things like the melting glaciers that warn us of global climate change that have a real serious likelihood of fucking up our entire world.

I don't know why we do this. It kind of pisses me off, and I wish we'd stop. But it seems to be a people thing and no amount of pissing and moaning on my part will do anything about it.

Varsity Drag

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns & Money...

...makes a hell of a frighteningly good point:

"...a huge social problem, which is made all the more difficult by a consensus, broadly shared across the ideological spectrum, that more education is the solution to an almost unlimited number of economic and social problems. For obvious reasons, those peddling these cures — which as he says is almost everybody in and around the world of education and employment policy — are not eager to consider that a large percentage of the population is not going to be helped by ever-more elaborate treatments along these lines."

Five years or so ago I wrote up a little post about one of the mortally wounded in this losing battle;

"This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it."

Campos points up the most damning statistic for those who want to cling to the Pollyannaish belief that enough "education" will solve the problems of capital flight and the enforced decay of the middle-class-wage jobs; that pay for college graduates has remained virtually unchanged over damn near 40 years. If a "college education" was the solution to the problem of corporate flight and the deliberate selection of capital over labor then you'd expect that that value would have risen steadily over time, as have prices, costs, and profits.

They have not.

This is not some sort of "inevitable" outcome, some sort of natural progression in the market economic cycle.

It is, instead, what happens when you choose to let the people who own businesses - including education business - do things that are in their short- (and medium-, or even long-term) interest but which are not in the interest of the society as a whole.

The implications of this slow-motion disaster seem obvious. An increasingly desperate citizenry is faced with an increasingly unpayable cost to try and grab and hold on to an increasingly unprofitable and decreasing number of jobs. This citizenry can be reliably counted on to be easily panicked by, and to be easy prey to, the least scrupulous, most vicious demagogue that promises whatever pie-in-the-sky the poor bastards think can save them and their children.

Are you scared? I'm scared.

Fuck, the whole idea is as scary as a secondhand plumber's pickup truck full of ISIS headcutters armed with nuclear machetes and hordes of venomous snakes carrying Ebola.

Why the hell CNN isn't all over this I...oh, wait.

We are so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

Climate Change for Dummies

One thing that makes me despair for my species is the appallingly chasm-like abyss of derp that you encounter whenever you say the words "climate change".

I mean, yes, it's a science. But it's not fucking rocket science.

What's the one single thing that we hairless monkeys have been doing more than anything else since the end of the Neolithic?

No, not screwing. We've been doing that forever and will continue so long as we have teensy tinsy little stupid-brains in our genitals, sort of like the ones that the big therapods had in their butts to help control their back ends. Except the genital tillermen and -women are usually busy driving us into a freaking tree in pursuit of each other instead of doing anything helpful. But that's beside the point.

No. We've been making stuff. Bronze axeheads. Iron plowshares. Steam engines. Cotton gins. Battleships. Nuclear power plants.

All this making means burning dead things. Wood. Coal. Petroleum. All that burning shoves gases and particulates into the air.

And we know what that does. We've seen it on Venus, where the gas blanket is so thick that it traps solar heating like a big ol' duvet.

So it's not some sort of wild speculation or conspiracy theory to draw the line from A to B to C; more industry = more gases = more insulation = more heat.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this extra heat could be a bad thing. Hell, even my old boss the Green Machine is worried. In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the authors said:

"Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.

These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Note the verb. "Poses". Not "might pose" or "could pose" or "fuck NOAA, this climate change stuff is a bunch of libtard hooey..." "Poses"; pose pōz/verb
3rd person present: poses

1. present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).
"the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area"
synonyms: constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be
"pollution poses a threat to health".

So. I go to my Facebook page and I find a post from a friend of mine. Great gal, Olympic athlete, mom, artist...and a pretty smart person. And she's got a link from "PragerU" talking about how climate change isn't a real - not a REALLY real - problem and, besides, "doing something" would be SOOOO expensive. "Will the enormous cost justify the gain?" is their tagline.

That's pretty much where I facepalmed. PragerFuckingU. Gah. Have you ever encountered those idiots?

SweetFuckingBabyJesusonaStick you've never seen drool-puddle-stupid until you've seen one of the videos these drooling stupids produce. They're supposed to present topics from a "conservative" point of view, "conservative" meaning, apparently, "the condition the human brain assumes when all the little brain cells have been herded onto cattle trucks and transported to extermination camps where they are dosed with ZyklonB in the brain showers..." but all they manage to do is make "conservatives" look "fucking stupid" by reducing complex topics to a word salad of conservative talking points, bad arguments, and outright lies.

Here's an article from something called The Blaze which is, so far as I can tell, some sort of wingnut website that luurves them some PragerU (Prager, BTW, is one Dennis Prager, a wingnut radio shouter before branching out into dubious "educational" schemes).

The article tries to make this "PragerU" sound full of awesomesauce but, instead, ends up making the wingut radio-shouter moron sound like...well, a wingnut radio-shouter moron. Here's the article citing the wingnut radio-shouter moron on foreign affairs;

“The people who try to make the Middle Eastern conflict complex have an agenda,” he said, giving just one example (see the condensed Middle Eastern lesson, below)."

Complex? Pshaw! Saddle up, l'il buckaroo, and let's ride through hundreds of years of migration, religious coexistence and conflict, resource allocation, consuption, and disputation, Mongol invasions, Ottoman rule, European colonial highjinks, and four Israeli-Arab wars - in just five minutes!

Yes. Somebody has an agenda here...but more'n likely it's the wingnut radio-shouter moron who thinks that you can "teach" the Middle East in five minutes.

That's "PragerU" and that's what my smart, dynamic, engaged friend thinks is a valid "take" on climate change. I've tried to expose Prager to her, I've tried to show her the science...and she won't go there. "I'm not convinced." she says. "What about "Climategate"? What about this? What about that?", throwing every wingnut talking point smokescreen out at me. She just. Won't. Budge.

And that's reeeeally depressing. Because she's a relatively "high-information" Republican sort of voter. She reflexively hates Clinton but is smart enough to recognize the passengers in the Republican clown car as three rings full of liars, fools, charlatans, and whackaloons. She's very religious but not self-righteous about it. She's usually pretty good people...but she's buying this and - I can't imagine any other reason other than - its because the wingnuts and Christopaths are yammering about it.

So this strikes me as pure tribalism. And if the Clown Clan can pull my friend into their Clubhouse of Bottomless Derp...what the hell can the rest of us do? There's enough of these people to jam things up enough, long enough, until we're all dog-paddling around Manhattan.

And then what..?

Too little to fail

So it turns out that - surprise - after former Superintendent Michelle Rhee threatened her teachers and their principals with the axe if they didn't get their students' test scores up (and the students were largely the usual inner-city no-hopers) they did what any sane human being would have done. They cheated.



Sigh.

What the fuck, people? Have I been talking to the goddamn wall here? We've been over this again and again and again; if you make MY success dependent on YOUR performance I will do my best to help you succed. But I will proceed to flog and beat and generally fuck you up if you fail.

And if you are a congenital fuckup to begin with, then I will lie and cheat my ass off to get past your deadweight ass and save my livelihood. I will recognize that I am better off taking a chance by cheating than to trust my future to you.

Anyone who doesn't believe that is true is a fool, or a grifter, or too good for this world.

Michelle Rhee is either one of those, or a bit of all of them.

And I am neither surprised nor disturbed by these "revelations". They were foredoomed from the moment she decided to put the livings of the people who worked for her in the hands of their students.

PTSO Bazaar

Back when I was a bold, bad paratrooper hanging out the door and kicking the ramp plates of a USAF C-130 over Panama I have to admit I would never in my maddest fantasy have pictured myself as a "PTA Dad". And, yet, here I am.

What's worse - or better, or at least different - is that I am also now the Astor Elementary PTSO (which stands for "parent-teacher-student organization" for those of you not hep to the latest public school slang) Volunteer Coordinator, a booby prize of exceptional ridiculosity earned because at the last meeting I felt bad that none of the more experienced, wiser PTA parents was willing to die on that particular hill.

Whatever happened to the "don't ever volunteer for nuthin'" paratroop sergeant I haven't the faintest fucking idea.

The latest manifestation of this madness was our participation in the annual PTA/PTSO Christmas bazaar. For two weeks we went crafty-mad making schwag to sell at this magilla; Mojo used her incredibly Mad Serger Skilz to sew up napkins, hankies, and little snack bags. She also repeated the terrific gift box idea she got last year, where she took old 33 1/3 LP covers and hot glue and made boxes. The Liberace one was pure over-the-top post-ironic hipster gold

The kiddos made gift tags.

My contribution were these:

Ornaments for the obsessed Portland Timbers fan, the perfect decoration for that Hanukkah bush or Holiday Tree. Mind you, I had to lean pretty heavily on the Cascadia Cup seeing as how that was the one pleasant memory of the past disastrous season...

And, for the record, the hankies and gift boxes were boss. Of the fifty-odd dollars we ended up making probably $40 came from Deb's crafty goodness. It says something about my future as a Christmas kitsch-crafter that the portion of my collection of Timbers scarves I used as part of the selling strategy drew as much or more interest than the actual bling.

But the whole idea wasn't to make money for the family (tho that was how my kids saw it, unsurprisingly...) but for the school, and I believe that the PTSO cleared several hundred dollars.

And that's the reality of "public education" in my city and country circa 2012. No, we don't get a lavish budget for Astor school while the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Instead we get some portion of the basic sort of wherewithal to give our kids a post-industrial-revolution education from the public purse but the dadoes and finials - everything beyond the building and the people in it and the supplies they need to teach the little mongers to read and cypher - has to come from this constant drumfire of fund-raising.

Music classes, field trips, drawing materials, athletic gear...all must be paid for somehow, and the Portland taxpayer buys into Grover Norquist's dream of a tax-free world like every other taxpayer. Price of Civilization be damned.

So the smaller aspects of my children's school days are dependent on little groups of giggling girls racing about an echoing gymnasium on a sunny Saturday afternoon and the parents behind them who are asked, again, and again, to reach into their lives and find something extra for their children.

Don't Fear The Reaper

The summer has finally arrived in Portland.

Now generally this is a Good Thing. For all that we made our bones being cold and rainy, we Stumptowners like the warm sun as much as anyone. We like trading our raingear for shorts and T-shirts, and our boots for flip-flops and topsiders. And especially this year, with the winter SO wet and lingering so long.

The only downside is that the grass then begins to grow.

And in the fertile valley at the end of the Oregon Trail, the bastard doesn't just grow. It metastasizes like a frigging green melanoma; a verdenoma that goes utterly bugnuts when the sun arrives to warm the rich soil and all that rain-soaked vegetation.

And this is what has happened to the little "Rain Garden" at my kids' elementary school. By last Saturday the grass was, in some places, two feet high.

Now that in itself is kind of sad.

First, take a look at the linked page to see what the big deal about this "Rain Garden" is. When we first moved here the courtyard between the wings of the school was this fugly asphalt rectangle; awash in the winter, baking in the early autumn and late spring, and just butt-ugly all year round.

The school district took about $100,000 and ripped out the asphalt and made the thing over into a garden designed to work in Portland's cool-wet-winter-hot-dry-summer climate.

The idea was that rather than a typical lawn (which, around here, would be dead grass and dandelions by August) the thing would contain "...trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers selected for their tolerance to dry and moist soil conditions."

Here's a picture of what it looked like when it was finished.

And here is was Saturday afternoon:

The first couple of years a group of parents who were involved in the construction continued to look after the Garden; weeding, watering in the summer (since despite what the brochure says the "hand pump" was never installed and the cistern was used as a compost bin, so the watering required City water), raking leaves in the fall.

But after their kids moved on to middle and high school that group fell away. Last Saturday there were four adults there to try and attack the mess; Mojo, and myself, and two other moms.

And it IS a mess.

Three years without attention and rough field grass have overtaken the native plants almost everywhere. Weeds - especially our hated Himalayan blackberry - have grown up in the planters. The mound at the west end - what I call "Hamburger Hill" - is covered in knee-high grass that makes walking or sitting on it a chore.

Because of the uninhabitable condition the teachers have stopped using the Garden completely. Mojo did a quick survey two weeks ago; not a single teacher was interested or willing to use the Garden in its existing condition.

For all practical purposes, over one hundred thousand dollars and hundreds, probably thousands, of parent, teacher, and donated contractor work-hours are, at present, utterly wasted.

My bride, lovely woman that she is, has taken an interest in this patch of weeds. She, and two of Missy's kindergarten pals moms, hauled me and the kiddos over on Saturday and began to hack away at the rampaging sea of grass with hand tools and a tiny residential trimmer.

I could have sat down and cried.

First, because there are something like 500 kids at Astor Elementary school. Assuming that half of them have two involved parents the potential labor pool runs to about 750 adults. And yet here were four people giving their time to try and rescue this expensive, wasted space. We were not just the 1 Percent; we were the 0.53 Percent. Of the some 750 parents with children at that school no more than four - and two of those parents of the same kids - could find time on a weekend to pitch in to gift that school some of their time and labor.

And, second, because much as I admired the gals' intentions, I couldn't believe their methods. Faced with a weedy Hannibal running wild they were trying to beat him by picking off one Carthaginian at a time with a boot knife.

Well. Sod THAT for a game of soldiers. The Army didn't teach me tactics and logistics for me to pull grass one clump at a time.

I told them flat-out that I had no intention of squatting on my hams like Luke the Gook pulling one clump of grass at a time.

And than I drove up to Columbia Boulevard and rented a big-ass gas-powered weed whacker, returned that afternoon and waded into the grass with my wailing scythe and reaped the damn stuff like Alaric.

So now Hamburger Hill is mown as level as a fairway, and the remainder of the Garden is flat as a putting green.

Until the next time.

Because there is still nobody at Astor in charge of the place. There is nobody to coordinate, implore, cajole, and direct volunteers, like me, to continue to maintain the place. There is nobody to coax teachers into using it, or children to visit it.

So while it has been reaped, there is still nothing in place to sow the future of this once-lovely little Garden. Instead it lies fallow, slowly deteriorating under the warm early summer sun.

And I put it to you that the story of the Reaper in the Rain Garden is one of America, circa 2012, writ small.

Begun with great publicity, on grant money and borrowed labor, and then thrown away through a combination of inattention, mismanagement, carelessness, and indifference. What might be a pretty little place for learning gone to waste for the lack of people who care enough to get off their dead asses and do some work for the common good, and "leadership" that would rather preen and posture than get down and do the hard work of getting those dumb bastards to understand that if we don't hang together we will surely, at the pleasure of our corporate masters, hang separately.

And while today our work on the Garden has reclaimed it, for the moment...

...the patient grass grows tall again as you read this. And we are still without a plan.

Ars Amatoria

My bride has - not one - but two master's degrees.
So, like the song says, she can spell s-e-x!

Just sayin'...

Caught the first half hour of "Get Yourself A College Girl" last night on TCM; a complete and utter shriek, and you can say I said so.

The title song above is so awful that it seems an almost intentional joke on what were known as "co-eds" back in the day. And compounding the joke is the scene a bit later where "Terri"'s fellow "co-eds" insist that she's, like, Joan of Arc leading them into this brave new world of female liberation. To have s-e-x, apparently. Which is, well, sorta not a real "Joan of Arc" thing, but, whatev'.

I understand that the rest of the film features some early Sixties musical brilliance (the reviewer at the link discusses perhaps the most famous; the appearance of Astrud Gilberto performing The Girl From Ipanema):

"My friends, what any viewer of this sequence has just experienced is pure -- repeat, untainted in any way -- musical perfection. Incredibly talented artists, at the absolute peak of their careers, captured on well photographed 35mm format performing their single most famous number.

It just doesn't get any better than this."

Plus some early British Invasion from The Animals and the Dave Clark Five...well, let's say that if I'd been perkier and the flick on earlier I'd have tried to watch the rest.

Instead I am left with the indelible impression of the 1959 Miss America crooning about how intellectual women are better because they really know how to screw.

Which is not how I recall it, but perhaps I went to the wrong school.

Carnival!

I meant to post this last Friday but first life got in the way and then Osama bin Laden got in the headlines again and I've spent quite a bit of time over at MilPub talking about his sudden trip to nap with the fishes.

Real life here in Portland went on, regardless.

Friday evening was the annual Astor Elementary School carnival, one of the fundraisers that the school runs to pay for the things that the taxpayers of Portland choose to consider optional, such as gym classes and copy paper.The carnival is always madness, and this year was no exception. And we couldn't work our usual tactics, which is to show up right when it starts at six, run the kiddos through the games, and then grab a hat. We agreed to volunteer this year and our volunteer times were very late in the evening. So although we arrived early we had to linger throughout the evening, trying to find ways to evade the worst of the crush and entertain the littles.This year was odd, in that for some reason (lack of volunteers? Funding? I have no idea...) the school staff set out fewer games. Several parents I talked to commented about that being frustrating, although none of them would talk about volunteering to help with the things. In place of the missing games we had several additions that proved very popular; two teachers doing that twisting-balloon art, and the "sumo" thing that you tend to see at minor league ballgames complete with ginormous padded fake sumo suit. Here's Mojo the Yokozuna at work.I think the Emperor's Cup is safe for another year.The dunk tank was there; it always is, an evergreen favorite of the fractious youths. This year, as usual, a pet teacher or two condescends to be the target of a dozen or so initial throws, but then the task of dunkee is delegated to some hapless student-teacher like this poor girl.For some reason, either because of a misplaced launch line or improved throwing skills among the groundlings the girl was dunked repeatedly. The water itself seemed warm enough. But the evening was cool before dusk and grew rather chilly rather quickly. She seemed in some discomfort sitting there on her bench in the breeze, so I'm not sure if she didn't welcome getting dunked.

The crowd is always one of the best parts of carnival and this year was no exception; the people-watching is always more scenic when the weather is fair, and this past Friday the evening was an unexpectedly sunny and pleasant one.Astor draws from a very diverse group, for Portland. We have some relatively well-off Caucasians such as Mojo and I, although probably the majority of the white kids and their families are what I'd call "working class" rather than middle class, though they probably would insist that they, too, are "middle class", such is the great attraction and illusion of the Bourgeoisie, the Great Suburban Dream, even here in the People's Republic of Portland.We have a relatively small number of black kids, and I have to say that the black families show more social variety than any of the other groups at Astor. Many, probably most, are African-American versions of the working class white folks...but there are some genuine dog-ass po' folks and their offspring. Both Mojo and I were approached by the same little black girl who announced without preface; "Gimme some money!" Her parents, if any were present, were nowhere to be seen, and being good, reticent products of the middle class neither one of us could tell an eight-year-old kid to fuck off and get a job. But the temptation occurred to me.

The largest single non-Caucasian group (and Caucasians are the immense majority here in North as they are all over Portland and Oregon, as well...) are the Hispanic families, all of whom are virtually absorbed in Portlandyness except for the affectation for polyester fleece that afflicts all Caucasian Portlanders I have met.The look of the crowd is that peculiarly American mixture of inappropriately sloppy and dressy; ratty T-shirts with fuck-me pumps, sequined tops with scuffed and ratty sneakers. The men always look dumpier and scruffier than the women, although a truly obese American woman somehow manages to look less salubrious and less intelligent than her rotund sister in Latin America or Europe. I'm no better; I'm in my work clothes, jeans, T-shirt, light jacket, ballcap the same a half the other men. We're a bloody mess, really.I'm always amazed at the degree to which the notion of "public dress" completely delaminated in the United States after the Fifties. Look at pictures of earlier crowds, even in the depths of the Depression. Everyone has their "going outside" clothes on. Women are in dresses and hats, as chic as they can afford. All the men have jackets or suitcoats and ties. Everyone looks like they came from work, or church unless the photo is deliberately snapped in a coal mine or a factory floor. But Astor carnival is no different than any other modern public venue in the U.S.; a mismatched melange of dressed-up and dressed-down, a schizoid mess without any sort of notion of what the crowd wants to look like to others, and, I suspect, even what they want to look like to themselves.I should note that the hit of the evening was the balloon-benders, at least once the second- and third-graders discovered that they would make balloon swords, scabbards, and shields. In moments heavily-armed eight-year-olds were slashing their way through shrieking masses of unarmed civilians, slicing like a mad Ginsu chef with a new chopper.The boys and a handful of little girls played swordfight for most of the rest of the evening, happily solving the problem of "how do we entertain the children".Little Miss, being feisty in a more strategic way, opted for this balloon flower instead. "It's a flower that's a heart" she described it, which is nothing if not true. And as you can see, with or without flower she knows exactly how cute she is.My volunteer assignment was on the clean-up crew, and it was here that I encountered the peculiar disorganized organization that used to drive me utterly batshit when I worked in the teaching biz.

Work parties are fairly simple things. They need a place to assemble, someone to assign the tasks, the tools to do the work, and some simple direction. When I showed up at eight o'clock I wandered around until I found a group of teachers chatting and asked them where the person in charge of clean-up was. They pointed vaguely to one of their number, who lead me into the cafeteria and suggested I put away the materials from one of the games. That took me about ten minutes, after which I looked around for the supposed crew leader to find no one other than casual bystanders.

However, it was fairly obvious that nobody had been tasked to clean the cafeteria. This was a fairly simple job for a former GI, and I scrounged up a broom, dustpan, mop, and towels pretty quickly. I swept up the nachos, mopped the spilled juice, chipped the densified cotton candy off the linoleum and had everything in decent shape in half an hour.

No one came to check and see how I was doing or inspect my work; again, something I half-suspected based on my teaching experience. The goofy thing about this pedogogical haphazardness is that somehow, mostly, the tasks manage to get done. I can never figure out quite how. The sheer disorganization and randomness of the process offends my military soul. But this scattershot way of doing things seems to satisfy something in many teachers' sense of individuality or something. Any sort of more rigorous discipline seems to rub a lot of teachers the wrong way; I've seen it.Eventually I finished with the cleaning and wandered into the wonderful old Fifties kitchen. I love the clunky old mid-century equipment and the massive appointments, designed in a less-disposable time by people who expected the kitchen to stand up to years of hamfisted abuse from harried cooks and careless kiddos and keep working. There's a sort of sturdy grace in these creations that eludes the newer, sleeker models.

I stand in the night kitchen wondering how many other generations of parents and children have passed through here, through this most American of places, the public school. A waystation on their way to adolescence, then adulthood, and then as parents with children of their own. Did they feel this, this faintly surprised sort of possessiveness for a place they thought they'd left behind? This combination of childhood memory and middle-aged regret; the recollection of the dreams forgotten and the recognition of the realities ahead?But now the janitor passes jingling his keys, and the light streams out the doorway into the darkened playground beyond. It's time to cross the street, and walk down the block, through the soft Spring evening towards the warmly lighted windows of home.

Потеряно

I'm not a great teacher. I do a serviceable enough job, when I have a subject I enjoy and students who are there to learn. I'm not one of these brilliant teachers who could make a yeshiva class excited about hog farming. I'm just there.

I'm not particularly patient, for one thing, and I have problems finding ways to explain subject matter to people who don't understand it. I hate discipline problems so teaching high school was fairly miserable for me and probably many of my students who (in the words of Charles Laughton surveying the mutinous crew of the Bounty) didn't know wood from canvas and didn't want to learn. Teaching at the local community college is better, since the students are paying their own way and paying for something, like being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully. But in the pedagogical horserace, I'm pulling the beer wagon. Trust me; nobody'd hit the trifecta on my teaching.

Every so often I make a genuine intellectual connection with a student and that is a very pleasurable and profitable thing. But those moments are quite unusual.

Much more typical is the young woman in the front row every Monday and Wednesday evening. Neatly dressed, quiet, with a faint, slightly puzzled expression that slips into vacancy from time to time as she loses the sense of the lecture.

She's probably twenty-four, was born abroad or here in southeast Portland of immigrant parents. She was probably a dutiful little student in primary school, a laughing outsider in the "Russian" or "Ukrainian" clique in high school. She probably managed a "C" in most of her high school subjects by dint of hard graft, lots of tutoring, and plenty of help from her teachers.

But she's lost in here, and I can see it in the increasing time her face wears that vacant look.

I've talked to her and she has very minimal English capabilities. Enough to hold a conversation, but she's in a science class and the technical and scientific terms are kicking her ass. She doesn't know a tsunami from mu shu pork, and with her poor English reading ability she's sunk trying to keep up.

This is the ragged edge of the "information society" that education and technology enthusiasts keep telling you about. This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it.

There are a lot like her.

We're Americans. We like to pretend that all of us can be winners, that we're all just a moment away from success, and that it's just a matter of finding the right magic; the right job, the right marriage, the right school, the right something...and we'll be happy and wealthy and secure.

We don't like to accept that not everyone can learn technical subjects. In fact, it's fairly critical that we don't know this, since as we've watched the old, simpler, hard-work jobs dwindle and those remaining provide less and less for the worker to live on we've steadfastly pretended that we would all just go to work for Intel and it'd be OK. It's important to us not to know that a man or a woman is hard-pressed to live comfortably doing manual labor work today even if such work can be found, lost as much of it is to automatons or outlanders who can be worked for wages you could not buy a pet with in our country. If we understood this we'd feel like we had to do something about it, and that would be difficult and unpleasant for everyone.

But the fact is that not everyone has the intellectual skills to do a technical job, or learn a difficult subject, especially math and science. Many people simply don't have the mental throw-weight; there's a reason that there are so many more fry-cooks than research chemists.

Even more people lack more the general skills needed for technical success; patience, organization, time management, perseverance. My experience is that literacy in general is not in a healthy state. Many people, perhaps more than you'd think, are almost incapable of extracting, analyzing and absorbing information from the printed page. By the time these people are in college, even the troglodyte college where I teach, this is a serious problem for them, and one that is difficult to remedy.

And, too, many of these people have been taught to fail in their early schooling. They have been taught to be afraid to expose their failings, to hide their inability to understand. Not to be "trouble", not to ask questions. They have been beaten with the stick of their own insignificance and ignorance and have lost much of the ability to learn for themselves. Their prior training, and much of their daily lives, makes it difficult for them to discipline and organize themselves enough to study their way out of their troubles, and they often lack even the ability to understand what it is they don't understand. And they're afraid to demand better instruction from people like me.

They are the casualties of our technical society, and after we kill them in the schools their bodies are tipped into the mass graves of the quickie-lube pits, the counters of the minimarts and the checkstands of the groceries, the posts of the night guards and the day laborers.

Or they sit, like my Russian girl, dumb and lost, in the hard plastic chair behind the table in the front row looking up at the whiteboard with the sad, empty eyes of the saints on the icon.

A Brief Palinesque Thought Between the Lines

And speaking of what happens when you leave religion and government alone in a drive-in movie to fool around, among the tit-bits I've been reading about the next GOP-VP candidate there was this:

"Her religious mentors in Alaska are genuine End-of-Days lunatics, and Palin has offered modest endorsement for the view that creationist superstition should be granted equal time in high school science classes."

To which, as a geologist, scientist and former public school science teacher I can only add: "Yowza!!"In fact, the hell with mere "creationism" ("intelligent design", whatever...), I think it's time to add, not just the been-there-done-that-got-the-T-shirt-Jesus-Hebrew-Bible creation myths to the public school curriculum, but the Muslim trope of God creating Man from clots of blood, the Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Jain, Zoroastrian, Sikh, Animist, Wiccan and Papuan-Newguinean creation stories as well as the every single Native America creation tale, the sweetbabyjesuswhothehellthoughtTHISstuffup you get from the Book of Mormon and whatever the fuck it is that L. Ron Hubbard believes in, booga booga Xenu space aliens and all.

Now THAT'll be a hell of an answer to question #12 on the federally-mandated science assessment test, you betcha! No Child Left Behind!

And, when you frame it this way, it sounds pretty damn idiotic, doesn't it?

SPQR II: O tempora! O mores!

Missed my deadline for the Friday "think piece" - got home, had dinner, played with little peeps and within fifteen minutes of getting the older one into his high bed I was pounding my ear. Ah, sleep. Sleep is good.

But I have been following the news and thinking about...not so much the individual news items but what our headlines and the national interests they purport to represent are telling me about the State of our Union.

Domestically our economy continues to misfire in an ominous fashion, but the principal public response seems to be no more than a nervous glance or three. Certainly the so-called "stimulus" tax giveaway seems to be a ridiculous sop to a credulous public, as useless a tool for halting the deflation of the retail bubble as a tampon in a typhoon.

In fact, no one in power seems to be particularly concerned about the frailty of an economy driven mostly by retail spending this mess exposes. Ah, well.And our foreign policy remains mathematically compounded of "ambition, distraction, uglification and derision". Given the feeble mix of Congressional self-importance and inanity on display at the Petraeus-Crocker hearings we can now rest assured that our pilgrim's progress in the Middle East will remain on track to do to the incoming President and the 111th Congress what in the Army we used to call "putting the turd in your pocket."

So. Rather than flog these motionless geldings, I thought I'd talk a little about something I ran across on a China adoption bulletin board.

Last week one of the correspondents - let's call her "A" for short - wrote this:

Someone just set off an M-80 in a stairwell at my stepson's high school. No one was injured, but the school was evacuated and all the nearby schools are on lockdown.

Apparently a few kids where quite shaken up. Today is the anniversary of Virginia Tech, various schools have been either closed or locked down in Chicago with week with different threats, and the NIU shootings 2 months ago are still very fresh in everyone's mind around here. A couple of the students in that shooting were from our
immediate area.

I don't know what the answer is to this. Schools are incredibly vulnerable, and most of the safety procedures in place can't prevent things like what happened at Andrew's school today.

Now first, let me explain that "A" is neither foolish, credulous nor a hysteric. Her posts have constantly shown her to be a bright, capable person with a full compliment of morals. She is probably in the 90th percentile for civility, the sort of person that the republican system of government was practically designed for.

And yet, here she is, shaken and almost panicked ("schools are incredibly vulnerable") because of a firecracker.

Last summer I wrote a long essay on the fall of the Roman Republic. I promised that in Part 2 I'd talk about how the present United States reflects these same failings. And this panic-in-the-classroom is where I want to start.

Fabius Maximus has a good discussion of his opinion of the two most dangerous enemies the U.S. faces: paranoia and hubris. We'll leave hubris for next time. Let's talk about fear.

Think about the fear expressed in "A"'s post. The evacuation and lockdown of her stepson's school. Virgina Tech. NIU. School shootings. Incredibly vulnerable. Safety procedures. This is the language of a city under siege, or a dangerous frontier. The underlying sentiment is a dangerous, frighteningly out-of-control world, where violent death is an everpresent danger and "safety precautions" are imperative to prevent the faceless but powerful enemies from harming us.

And is this conclusion surprising? Visit your local news channel. Watch a snipbit of the morning infotainment - sandwiched amid the celebrity gossip and the live-from-the-local-animal-shelter-adorable-pet segment most of the news is about fires, murders and assorted domestic horrors - many of them far from your local area. A shooting in Tumwater. Child killer in Bethesda. Home invasion in Los Angeles.
Given the relative sizes of our populations, 21st Century America is a fantastically peaceful nation. We have no Mongol Invasions, no Black Death, no Servile Wars. As an American citizen of middle class aspirations and late middle age, circa 2008, I have about the same ridiculously tiny, statistically insignificant chance of being: immolated in aerial bombardment, ventilated by a crazed gunman, perishing of a pandemic plague, being crucified by rebel armies or getting lucky with Lucy Liu.But you'd never know this if you didn't venture outside television news and newspaper articles.

OK, you'd get the "Lucy Liu" thing if you've seen my pictures. Sigh.

But our principal sources of information are dominated by death and violence to the point where I suspect that most Americans truly believe that we live in the most perilous times that have every been.Whether your terror is Islamofascism, global warming, invading Meskins...I believe that many, many citizens of my country are hypersensitized to fear. I find it hard to believe, for example, that America in 2008 is truly more brutish and violent than America in 1808 or 1888, what with the earlier combinations of frontier war and raid, lynching, easy access to weapons and liquor, poor hygiene and rudimentary medical care and little or no access to nonlethal redress in the form of courts, newspapers, mediators, Judge Judy and Montel Williams.

The difference? The madman who butchered six strangers and himself over in the next county was, at most, the subject of distant gossip in 1808 or 1888. What happened the next state over was ancient news, the next country? Wild rumor. We weren't hammered with images and sounds of carnage. We didn't have CNN - we had Goya.

So here's why I see this as a problem. Let's take "A"'s school. First, any bodyguard will tell you that if some jerk wants to hurt you and doesn't care about paying for it, he can. So the ONLY way to prevent the sort of violent disturbances in schools is to provide them with the kind of security we now reserve for prisons and airline terminals.And - if we are convinced that the world is so frightening and vile that the ONLY choice we have is the level of this protection we will provide - we will end up seeking and spending more for all kinds of expensive gadgets up to and including weaponry to defend them.

Or to attack. And so we pursue ever increasingly expensive solutions for ever less critical problems - foreign wars, antimissile systems, F-22 fighters and metal detectors for schools - while closing our eyes and ears to things that can truly harm us: a dysfunctional economy, foreigners furious with foreign occupation, graduating poorly educated kids - usually minority kids - with just enough marginal skills enough to fail in a technological society, thus insuring a semi-permanent underclass and a widening gap between those wealthy enough to succeed, prosper and rule and those who are not.

"What kind of a crisis was it in which it was not Roman society that fell apart, but Roman reality - the sense of shared security in an order that was essentially unquestioned?" Christian Meier, Caesar (1982)

It is in this way that great nations decline. But the foolishness, fear and ignorance of the plebians isn't enough. Greed and pandering of the popular press isn't enough. There must be stupidity, blindness and greed amongst the equestrians and the senators.

Next time: SPQR III: Tribunes of the Plebs