Last month, the FMCSA released a new proposed regulation for public comment. The proposal is for a electronic ID system that would place a transponder in every interstate commercial motor vehicle that would transmit a unique electronic ID number. This number would allow police to remotely track every single commercial vehicle and its contents. The government claims that there are no “credible” privacy concerns for carriers and drivers.
The proposed regulation takes effect in early December.
In a continuation of a trend I have been reporting for awhile, the military is shrinking because of a fall in retention and enlistment. First the Army and now the National Guard reports that they are falling short in meeting manpower targets, falling short by about 7,500 troops. Senior leadership is blaming a large decrease in troops reenlisting for the shortfall.
Officials claim that people are not reenlisting because they are disappointed by not being able to deploy and get shot at. I think that’s bullshit. They are failing to reenlist for a few reasons:
It seems that most of the nation’s military isn’t as excited about woke bullshit as the left would have us believe.
A female cop who safely took cover outside while children were being slaughtered for over an hour in the Uvalde incident was seen on body cam video saying that, if her kid was in there, she would have gone into the school to save him. I guess other people’s kids weren’t important enough to her. She was fired, and rightly so.
Less than three months later, the department quietly rehired her. It wasn’t until the parents of dead kids discovered it that she was re-fired. To the parents of Uvalde, the lesson should be clear: their local politicians and cops don’t give a flying rats ass about them or their children. If some parents in that town don’t start demanding that every, single. cop. in that town be fired, then they and their kids deserve whatever happens to them. The contempt that is evident in the stealth rehiring of this cowardly bitch speaks volumes on how they feel about the children of their town.
What surprises me even more is that some distraught parent of a dead child hasn’t decided on some vengeance. The first kid who was killed is on the shooter. Most of the ones that were killed later? Those all lie at the feet of the cops, and I am surprised at the restraint shown by the parents.
Is it restraint, or herd mentality?
Students don’t learn because teachers don’t teach. The reason for this is that the teachers who try to teach get screwed over and either burn out or get fired when students and parents complain that classes are too hard. So the good teachers either leave or give up and phone it in. I discovered this the hard way.
After I retired, I took a couple of years off before becoming a teacher, which I did part time for two years, and then full time for the next five years. I taught high school science classes during all of that time. For the first couple of years that I was full time, I taught advanced courses like Chemistry and Physics. The courses I taught allowed a student to take an exam after it concluded, and if they scored high enough on that exam, they would receive college credit for the course. In other words, a college level class being taught at the high school level. Students hated the fact that my course was difficult and constantly complained. Meanwhile, school administrators wanted my course to be both more rigorous and easier for students to receive an A.
During that first full time year, I was physically attacked in my classroom by a student because I took his cell phone and told him he would have to get it from the office. I wound up quitting that job and changing school districts.
The second year saw me teaching physics in my new school district. Students were constantly complaining that I was destroying their GPA because my class was too hard. They just didn’t have the math or study skills to be successful. I spent far too much of my time trying to teach things like calculating uncertainty, which isn’t that mathematically difficult.
A quiz in this class would look something like this (you will find the answers at the end of this post, for those of you geeky enough to want to solve them):
They began circulating a petition to get me fired. I caught them cheating. It was a tough year. The average grade for the class of 20 students was an 84, with 3 students getting an A, and two getting a D. The rest got B’s and C’s. When the college exams came around, four of them managed to score high enough for college credit.
So in year three, they gave me standard track Biology to be taught to the students that they euphemistically referred to as “underperforming.” This paper, written by a 15 year old who was in the 10th grade, is what I had to work with. Yes, this is a scan of an actual paper that was turned in to me, and no, he is not retarded:
At the beginning of year four, I was pulled aside by the principal and asked if I wanted to go back to teaching physics to the smart kids. It seems that the teacher that they had given that class to gave 3/4 of the class an A, but every one of them failed the college credit exam, even though the class average was a 92. I told them that the only way I would teach it was if I would not have to catch any static from administrators when students complained about their grades. The reply that I got was “We were hoping that you would agree to find a way to make your class more fun.” I declined and was sentenced to teach Biology to the dumbasses again. Hey, at least the lovable little morons weren’t trying to get me fired.
COVID hit at the end of that year. Teachers were instructed to hold class by Zoom meetings, we were required to give and grade assignments, and were told to enforce it rigorously. So I did. I would up doing quite a bit of effort and work, holding class. Only a quarter of my students did the work. At the end of the school year, the school district gave everyone at least a C. To think I could have done nothing for three months and gotten paid.
My fifth year as a full time teacher was to teach physical science. At the halfway point of the year, we were told that, due to the stress of COVID, we would have to give every student a passing grade. More than a half of my students were chronically absent. Then we were told that our students’ performance on end of the year exams would not affect their grades, but would affect our pay raises. I quit a week later and went back to health care.
ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ ARE BELOW THIS LINE
The US debt crossed the $31 trillion mark on October 3, just eight months after it crossed $30 trillion on January 31.
Less than three years ago, the debt was $23 trillion.
Twelve years ago, it was $13.6 trillion.
No wonder inflation is as high as it is. Even so, it’s going to get much, much worse.
Democrats in NYC are promising illegals that Florida will pay them $15 an hour to cleanup hurricane damage in order to put them on buses and send them to Florida.
Liberals are not standing on the moral high ground that they claim to be standing on.
This morning’s military article comes to us with news that the sailor who had been accused of burning down a baby carrier has been cleared of any wrongdoing. The article actually points out two problems that have plagued the Navy for decades.
The first is that the US Navy has a long history of finding scapegoats upon whom to place blame for institutional failures. In this case, you have a ship that is poorly maintained and cluttered with junk. A sailor warns his division officer that the place is a fire hazard and is ignored. A fire is started by some unknown source. Sailors can’t put it out because they and their officers have no idea how to perform even basic damage control. Instead of blaming the command for poor training, maintenance, and housekeeping, blame the sailor who tried to warn you. The Navy saves face, and who cares about those stupid enlisted men? They are there to be destroyed for the sake of officer careers.
That is reminiscent of the Iowa explosion. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.
However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.
That brings us to the second issue exposed by the above article. The Navy has had recruiting issues for decades. The smarter and nerdier recruits all want to go to the Air Force, which is seen as more technical and cerebral. A lot of the muscle-head jocks want to prove their masculinity and join the Marines. Many other kids want to be able to play with machine guns and blow shit up, so join the Army. What does the Navy have? The Navy has historically solved that problem by trying to project this image that everyone in the Navy is a fighter pilot, a SEAL, a computer technician, or an officer. You will note that no one in Navy movies except Steven Seagal is ever a cook, and even then, Seagal was a Navy SEAL cook. Assigned to a battleship. Not everyone can have those awesome jobs. In fact, most Navy jobs are tedious jobs more akin to janitorial work than to anything cool or technical. There are more people cleaning toilets and doing officers’ laundry than there are SEALS in the Navy. (There are as many Admirals as there are ships– someone has to be their orderlies.)
So the Navy convinces everyone that they can be a SEAL, or a Rescue Swimmer, or a nuclear power plant operator. The recruiters make the pitch and convince you that your job is going to be AWESOME, and will come with all sorts of promotions and large cash bonuses. What they don’t tell you, or at least gloss over, is that the washout rates are on the order of 80 percent or more for some programs. Sometimes they wash you out for nebulous reasons, like “possesses traits undesirable in this career field” because the kid got caught with a beer while under 21 years old. Starry eyed high school kids join the military to be SEALS, washout before training even starts, and find themselves cleaning toilets and chipping paint with a hammer for the next four years.
The Navy knows that those jobs suck, but they have you under contract for the next four years, so they don’t care if the sailor is happy or not. As evidenced by the statement from the Navy prosecutor:
Prosecutors said Mays was angry and vengeful about failing to become a Navy SEAL and being assigned to deck duty, prompting him to ignite cardboard boxes on July 12, 2020…Mays thought he would be jumping out of helicopters on missions with the SEALs, but instead he was chipping paint on the deck of a ship, and he hated the Navy for that, Jones said.
This is a common story. The reality of the Navy is far different from the image it portrays in the movies. The Captain of the ship doesn’t listen to some E-4 Petty Officer with grudging respect for the knowledge he possesses. The Captain is more likely to be a career ticket puncher who is desperately trying to become one of the Navy’s 265 Admirals, and will destroy that E4’s life to do so. I can’t speak for the other branches, but that is life on the big, gray boat.
The US military will now begin accepting people who once tested positive for weed. I didn’t know that this policy had ever ceased. When I was in the military back in the 80s, you could get a waiver for THC use in your past, as long as you stayed clean after enlisting.
So many on the right keep claiming that the military would never fire on American citizens if they were ordered to do so. WRSA comes up with a few examples of the military firing on American citizens. They left out an important one.
Congress had long paid a bonus to troops who fought in times of war, to make up the difference between a soldier’s full time civilian job and his soldier’s pay. Coolidge tried to veto the bonus for the troops of World War 1, but his veto was overridden.
Under the law that was passed, each veteran was to receive a dollar for each day of domestic service, up to a maximum of $500 (equivalent to $7,900 in 2021), and $1.25 for each day of overseas service, up to a maximum of $625 (equivalent to $9,900 in 2021). Deducted from this was $60, for the $60 they received upon discharge. Amounts of $50 or less were immediately paid. All other amounts were issued as Certificates of Service maturing in 20 years’ time, or 1945.
By 1932, many veterans had been out of work because of the depression, so about 17,000 of them camped out in two Hoovervilles that were located in Washington, DC. They went there with their families, hoping to be paid the bonus that they were owed in 1932 instead of 1945. The two groups numbered as many as 50,000 men, women, and children.
The camps were tightly controlled and well cared for by the veterans, who laid out streets, built sanitation facilities, set up an internal police force and held daily parades. A vibrant community arose, including churches in tents, kitchens, a library, and even their own post office.
They were told that the only way that they would be paid what they were already owed was to accept work in the Civilian Conservation Corps at Fort Hunt, Virginia.
Some accepted that and went to work, others did not. The veterans thought that by sitting there and refusing to leave, the government would eventually have to relent and pay them what they were owed. Instead, they were given an ultimatum: leave by May 22, or else.
Hoover ordered police to go in and clear them out on July 28, 1932. When some of the veterans refused to leave, one policeman drew his service revolver and shot two of them, both of whom were killed. General Douglas MacArthur then rolled in that afternoon with 1,000 armed troops of the 12th Infantry and 3rd Cavalry regiments, 800 policemen, and six tanks, all supported by machine guns.
Patton, who was in charge of the 3rd Cavalry, had this to say:
“If you must fire do a good job — a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson. . . . When a mob starts to move keep it on the run. . . . Use a bayonet to encourage its retreat. If they are running, a few good wounds in the buttocks will encourage them. If they resist, they must be killed.”
The infantry charge was made with fixed bayonets and suppported by the use of Adamsite (an arsenic based vomiting agent). Hoover ordered the assault stopped once the veterans had retreated across the river, but MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack, claiming that the Bonus March was an attempt to overthrow the US government. A veteran’s wife miscarried. When one 12-week-old infant died of respiratory complications caused by the chemical warfare attack, a government investigation reported he died of enteritis. In the end, a total of three civilians were killed, more than 1,000 were injured (some by gas, including an 8 year old boy left blind for life) and 2 police officers received injuries.
The negative publicity of the attack on its own veterans was believed to be one of the major factors in Hoover losing the 1932 election to FDR.
Not only were MacArthur and his troops willing to fire on and use chemical warfare agents against veterans and their families, in many cases the veterans who were being fired upon had served in the same units as the soldiers who were attacking them with bayonets. In the end, none of the veterans received a single cent of what they were owed, not in 1932, not in 1945, not ever.
Don’t make the mistake of believing for one single second that the military today would hesitate to kill you, if so ordered.
It has long been said that wealthy, elitist Democrats don’t care about illegal immigration because they don’t have illegal immigrants in their neighborhoods. Ron Desantis has proven that old saying to be correct by shipping some illegals to Martha’s Vineyard.
FDR put inconvenient non-whites into military guarded camps. Now the left has found another group of non-white people to put into camps. Less than 36 hours after arriving in Martha’s Vineyard, which declared itself to be a sanctuary location, the immigrants that arrived there were shipped off to a concentration camp to be guarded by 125 National Guard troops activated for that express purpose.
It isn’t that liberals don’t understand hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, as Miguel argues. They fully understand it. The leftists have simply decided that they don’t have to follow the rules that they have set for others.
In the meantime, everyone on the left who supports this needs to be called a racist who supports putting Hispanics into concentration camps.