Category Archives: Human Behavior

Don’t take any chances – CC all your emails and posts to the NSA

Posted on June 29, 2013 by | 17 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Got to thinking last night before I slid off to sleep, “What if the NSA ain’t reading my emails and other stuff I write?  What if some get lost in the shuffle, or worse, what if they just aren’t interested enough to read mine?

How damned de-humanizing is THAT?

Sheeze!  Brought me spang awake with a start.  Those bastards might be going flaccid on the job, reading everyone elses’ stuff, but not mine.

I thought about it a while as I scratched niaid behind the ears, got up and took my third [under pressure] cold shower of the day, dried off and scratched Hydrox behind the ears pondering it.

Still felt insecure and de-machoed, so I kicked on the AC unit for a few minutes to knock the edge off the cold sweat I was breaking out in.

Okay.  First crack out of the box, this ain’t something I’m going to sit still for, ain’t going to tolerate it.  Those bastards are going to read my stuff whether they like it or not.  I’m going to put them on the list of CCs for all my emails, and if I can find out who my senator or congressman is, I’ll write them.

See if I can get a congressional committee started to get those guys from NSA in and test them, grill them hard to make sure they aren’t falling down on the job.

Piss me off.

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Communication, Government, Human Behavior, Police, Politics, Senior Citizens, Surveillance

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Hungry for heroes? Find a thief, a robber, a killer, or an aristocrat

Posted on June 28, 2013 by | 11 comments

 frank and jesse james

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I was thinking last night before I dozed off about what TV, movies and fiction have done for us that reality couldn’t.  I concluded it all boils down to mythology and self definition.  An attempt to bring little guys into a larger picture where, in fact, they don’t exist.

Consider this:  Can you name a single person involved in the American Revolution below the rank of Colonel other than Paul Revere?  Anyone between then and the War of 1812? 

From then until the Mexican War you might recall Nat Turner and his brief slave rebellion, or Davy Crockett, Travis, Sam Houston, et al.  The mountain men and the fur traders.  Meriwether Lewis and Clark, the Kit Carsons, Bridgers, the Coulters and Joe Meeks.  The wild and wooly.

And all the names from the lower paygrades you might recall from the Mexican War are there because they were colonels and higher during the Civil War.

Follow it right on through from then until the Wars and whatever else is happening today.  Where the hell are the lower-paygrade heroes?

Younger, Cole & James left to right

Well, the fact is, they were out there at the time.  They were the outlaws, the killers, the people most successful at taking what didn’t belong to them away from the people it belonged to.  The James Gang, the Daltons, Butch and Sundance, Billy the wossname, Kid, the Youngers.  Buffalo Bill, wiping a species off the face of the continent so’s the trains wouldn’t be troubled by them and cow men could use the land for cows.  Masterson, the Earps, Hickok.  Steely-eyed killers.

The US needed the genre fiction, the film industry and television to clean up history.  The country needed common people out there getting massacred by Apache, Lakota, Comanche, people with names.  People below the rank of colonel with names that weren’t John Jacob Astor and weren’t just getting filthy rich and powerful from it all.

So you want the heroes of the west today?  Well, there’s John Wayne.  Henry Fonda.  Steve McQueen.  Jeff Chandler on the generic Indian side.  Burt Lancaster.  Gary Cooper. 

All of whom also, by coincidence, became the heroes of all the other wars the US fought.  Became the common men of history where none existed before.  Winning the west from the people who owned it, whupping the Germans and Japanese, the Vietcong and NVA, the Chinese and North Koreans. 

All those heroes, frequently below the paygrade of colonel, helping us to understand our great heritage.  Because, after all, our heroes define us in ways we’d be too modest to define ourselves.  Most of us ain’t all that successful at taking shit that doesn’t belong to us, individually.

At least those of us who never got higher than the rank of major.  The aristocratic dynasties went to Washington but the heroes all came out of Hollywood.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 2013, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans

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“Six-million focking dollars!”

Posted on June 25, 2013 by | 8 comments

The Dollar Tree store in Kerrville is located in a strip mall across from the high school stadium.  As I drove by on my way into the mall parking lot I noticed the stadium parking lot across the street was almost full of over-sized white grocery-bags.  Hundreds of white bags taller than a man about four feet to a side.  I squinted, but couldn’t fathom what they were.

After I finished in Dollar Tree I crossed the lanes of traffic and pulled into the stadium parking lot for a closer look.  Still couldn’t figure it out.  But a tree-trimming crew was taking a break there in the parking lot, half-dozen Hispanic guys.

I drove over and rolled down the window, guy in charge strolled up.  “What is all that?”

“Six million focking dollars!  Six million focking dollars of MY money!”

“Eh?  You’re saying those bags are full of money?”  Shaking my head.

He laughed.  “They might as well be.”  He pointed to a pile of rolls of Astroturf at the other end of the lot.  “They’re replacing that stuff with the stuff in the bags.  REAL grass is against the law!”  He guffawed and the rest of the crew laughed with him.

  I guess the Kerrville School District must have all the books, computers, teachers, everything else it needs to teach those kids to balance their checkbooks, read, write and cypher.  Got everything it needs to prepare them for life after the nest.

Got $6,000,000 focking dollars lying around to put a new ersatz grass floor on the stadium for the jockstraps to run around on.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Texas

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When the world ended

Posted on June 25, 2013 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Driving to Kerrville yesterday my mind wandered to the uncle of my ex-wife.  Uncle Ed.  Interesting man.

He was on the staff of Douglas MacArthur during WWII and was one of the first group of people into Japan after they agreed to stop fighting.  Stood on the USS Missouri while the documents were being signed by all the parties and served on MacArthur’s staff for a while when MacArthur was Supreme Commander of Allied Pacific Forces.

Uncle Ed had a lot to say about all that when he could find someone to listen.  I listened a good bit.

Ed thought there were a lot of serious flaws in the Japanese surrender speeches and documents by the Emperor and the other high-ranking Japanese officials.  Fact is, neither the Emperor, nor the high-underlings ever mentioned the word, surrender.  Nothing in any of it contained anything suggestingJapanese Imperial behavior toward the conquered lands was reprehensible, no mention was made of the treatment of prisoners, the tortures, the slaughters.

In fact, the ‘surrender amounted to a Japanese admission they’d tried to do what they thought was best for Asia and Japan, and lacked the moxey to pull it off.  The Emperor confirmed this as his view in a presentation to the Diet four days after the arrival of MacArthur onto Japanese soil.  Immediately following the speech by the Emperor his uncle, Prince somebody-or-other went further and proclaimed Japanese behavior was no different from the behavior of other strong, modern nations.  He pointed out they didn’t take Indochina from the Indochinese, but from the French, didn’t take Malaya from the Malayans, but from the British.  And so on.

Maybe it’s actually no surprise the Mayor of Osaka made his statements recently that the ‘comfort girls’ they forced to serve their troops were just a necessary evil to keep up the morale.

Carolyn’s uncle Ed recalled the Japanese aristocracy was egalitarian in this regard.  He smiled that within five days of the arrival of US troops in Yokohama they’d brought in hundreds of peasant girls to serve in brothels to keep up the morale of occupying US troops.  The money from those whore houses, the supposed, was the first significant US currency to circulate in Japan after the war.  A few hundred thousand GIs need a lot of comforting.

I don’t suppose there’s actually any reason the Japanese today should feel any shame and remorse for the actions of their grandfathers.  Any acknowledgement.  The fact is, Asia remembers for them, even though the US has forgotten.  Of all the countries in the world in danger of flexing their military muscles, probably there’s not one with as many willing hands on whatever it would take to stop them among their potential adversaries.

Digression:  Aside from the deck of the USS Missouri and the whore houses, one of Ed’s most vivid recollections of immediate post-War Japan was that every civilian vehicle he saw ran on charcoal.  Charcoal!  Imagine that!

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2013, America, History, Human Behavior, Military, WW II

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Disambiguating Phobos

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | 6 comments

phobos

If you’re like me you’re probably getting fairly impatient with all this shilly-shallying around that’s been happening with finding out what’s going on with the Mars moon, Phobos.  That thing has been out there making people who know everything feel less good about themselves than they want to almost since it was first discovered.  Forcing them to use terms such as, ‘poorly understood’, ‘not completely understood’, ‘not yet fully understood’, when they write things about the way it behaves.

Problem is the thing refuses to behave itself the way the people who know how objects in orbit ought to behave.  As I recall it’s the fastest moving object in the Solar System, and I mean FAST.  And it isn’t anywhere near as dense as it ought to be.  Just for beginners.

If there’s an ‘artifact’ anywhere in the Solar System, Phobos probably stands a better chance of being it than anything else anyone knows about does.

NASA Eyes ‘Hedgehog’ Invasion of Mars Moon Phobosby Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com ContributorDate: 19 January 2013 Time: 10:35 AM ET

http://www.space.com/19342-space-hedgehogs-mars-moon-phobos.html

A daring, “Angry Birds”-like NASA mission could bombard a Martian moon with robotic “hedgehog” probes in the next few decades, scientists say.

The space hedgehogs are actually small, spiky, spherical rovers that form part of a novel mission idea called Phobos Surveyor. The rovers would take advantage of the low gravity on the Mars moon Phobos, its sister moon Deimos, or asteroids in the solar system. Engineers have designed the devices to work in concert with a nearby mother ship.  

The hedgehogs would work well in the low gravity of the 16-mile-wide (27 kilometers) Phobos, a force 1,000 times weaker than the gravity on Mars itself, where NASA’s Curiosity and Opportunity rovers currently explore, said researcher Marco Pavone of Stanford University. Gravity on Mars is about one-third that of the Earth.

Okay, fine.  But the fact is, I’d like to see some questions answered about this thing before I get dead, or much more senile than I am already.  I want to know whether that thing is hollow.  And going about it in slow steps, using things that haven’t even been invented yet is going to take a long time. 

We spent all that money during the 1950s and 1960s inventing hydrogen bombs we never got any use out of.  Maybe it’s time to put them to some useful work.  We probably have the technology today to get a hydrogen bomb delivered right there dead center of Phobos within the next couple of years.

Time someone, hopefully the Chinese or the Japanese, launched a hydrogen bomb at phobos to see what happens when it hits.  And whether it shoots back.  Time for some serious disambiguation.

Just saying.

Jules

Edit:  The thing’s obviously not able to defend itself anyway and the chances of it shooting back are almost certainly not all that likely.  Whatever made all those dents in it, the impacts are bound to have generated a lot of heat inside and rattled the eye teeth of the might-have-been computers and defunct Buffalo Bills aiming rockets and pushing buttons of weapons systems.  Knocking a nice hole right in the middle a person could focus a telescope on for a looksee would improve things enough to make it worth the risk and the cost.    Easily enough to make it worth the miniscule risk of it raining down nukes on the Japanese or Chinese launch sites.

6 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Astronomy, Education, Government, Grants, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Nature, Science, Senior Citizens

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Distractions

Posted on June 16, 2013 by | 11 comments

powerline helper

I’d have gotten more done Friday if I hadn’t come across this on the way into town.  I’d seen them doing the same thing the previous day, but didn’t have the camera.

powerline helper3

Can’t help wondering what the dingle dangler and helicopter pilot do for excitement on their days off.

powerline helper4

“So, how was your day, honey?”

“Same old same old.  Boss looking over my shoulder all the time.”

11 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Transportation

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Now realllllly – Some things might be worse than dying

Posted on June 12, 2013 by | 2 comments

Mary Jane and Sniffles

They know Mary Jane ain’t going to kill them.  Lying about it, pretending it might just proves to them you’re a liar or a fool and that nothing you say is worth taking seriously.

Wouldn’t it be better to just tell the truth?

Ah baby! Yes. Yes. YES!

Ah baby! Yes. Yes. YES!

“What will your mother say when you get out of the slammer and she discovers you’ve been anally raped by every ethnic prison gang ranging from the White Brotherhood to the Crips, the Bloods, to La Raza Unita? 

“That you were forced to perform oral sex every night for the  guy  in the top bunk?”

Mommy wants that to happen to OTHER peoples’ kids and doesn’t want you to know she wants it for them, but she sure as hell doesn’t want it to happen to hers.  So she tells you the next best thing.  A lie.

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior

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Forgotten Lost Victories – The Modocs – 1852

Posted on June 11, 2013 by | 5 comments

shelf indian

Bringing civilization to Native Americans was never easy.  Almost every step of the way the tribes selfishly hoarded the lands they depended upon, frequently resorting to violence when whites who needed the land for farming, ranching and mining tried to run them off.

One example was the Modocs in northern California, 1852.  The US suddenly owned the land, having disproved the false claims by Mexico of ownership by invading them and killing as many as they could catch.  But the Modocs were spoiled by being owned by Mexico, being mostly left alone.  When whites came into the Tule Lake area the Modoc slaughtered 38 innocent people.

Ben Wright and a group of miners from Yreka, California attempted to peacefully resolve the situation by having a feast for the tribe, but almost to a person the Modoc unreasonably refused to eat the poisoned food. 

Wright and the miners were forced to fire into the mass  of tribal members, which allowed a third of them to escape.  That failure led to decades more of Modoc attempts to halt the march of civilization and disputing rightful white claims to the land.

hands_off_please[ KC Library

Not until 1873, after seven months of hard fighting and the loss of many innocent white lives were the Modoc finally subdued permanently and the leaders hanged.

A microcosm of the history of the western US where flawed and improper leadership and planning resulted in the needless loss of innocent white lives.

5 Comments

Posted in America, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans, US Army

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Finally it begins to make sense

Posted on June 11, 2013 by | 19 comments

first man in space

I read somewhere recently the efforts to teach sign language to great apes since the 1970s gave a lot of them vocabularies large enough to allow IQ tests. The lowest a mountain gorilla ever scored was 97. Smarter than a lot of people. And I read somewhere else there’s only a 1% difference between the DNA of a chimp and that of a human being.

All of which suggests to me there might be sub-species of human beings, not quite human but not different enough to identify as an entirely different species. Politicians, genetic engineers, Wall Street bankers, CEOs of multi-national corporations, along with Hitler, Stalin et al might finally be explained that way.

I’d never considered the possibility aristocrats might be merely close relations to human beings without actually crossing the great divide to become human.  That maybe they’re just a smidgen of lifetimes behind on the reincarnation trail, sniffing along trying to catch up, but getting distracted by the fire hydrants others among them peed on as they struggled to gain humanhood.

19 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Human Behavior, Politics, Science

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Something’s happening at Slab City

Posted on June 10, 2013 by | 13 comments

Back when I posted the thing about Slab City, CA, I eventually decided despite my curiosity about the place I just have too many things left I want to do in my life to get out there and check it out:

Slab City, California – An Impromptu Community

The place is so hot summertime only about 100 people stay there during the scorching months.  And winter months there just seemed to be too many other ways to spend the time to justify a visit out there. 

Now they’ve formed some sort of an organization willing to pay someone $400 per month to sweat through the summer months doing some sort of maintenance on Salvation Mountain.  Likely they’ll get a lot of interest in the $400 per month and the fervor among the interested will dwindle rapidly as the thermometer climbs.

But the last RV Workers on Wheels newsletter had this:

CA: Camp Host at Art Preservation Site in Slab City

by Salvation Mountain Inc. – Slab City, California, USA
(Nin-Profit Volunteer Site Manager with Site and Stipend)

Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain

Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain

 

Salvation Mountain is an “outsider art” monument at the entrance to Slab City, created over 30 years by Leonard Knight. Leonard’s unique and enduring vision is one of universal love.

Leonard painted his vision on the cliffs at Slab City over a period of 30 years. He can no longer maintain his monument, due to declining health, so a charitable corporation was formed. The Salvation Mountain Inc. Board of Directors has the responsibility of continuing to preserve Leonard’s dream.

We are looking for a camp host and site manager to work with our board of directors at this monument in the desert. This is a volunteer contract position, where we provide a living space for an RV, a small stipend of $400 per month, plus solar electricity, water, trash removal, and internet access. We also have a park model trailer on the site.

You can learn more about Salvation Mountain at http://www.salvationmountaininc.org.

Slab City is a boondocking “off the grid” community in the desert in Southeast California, just east of the Salton Sea. For information about Slab City, go to this website: http://www.slab-city.com.

Salvation Mountain Inc. is a registered charitable non-profit company charged with preservation of Leonard Knight’s art site called Salvation Mountain. Leonard Knight starting building Salvation Mountain almost 30 years ago. While I, a board member, am not a particularly religious person, I do appreciate Leonard’s dedication and vision, especially his message of universal love. This is not a religious charity, it is an art preservation charity.

We are trying to find a site manger (aka a camp host) to live at the Salvation Mountain site 24/7. It’s a contract position, and there is a stipend of $400 per month to help with expenses. We provide water, solar power, internet and trash removal. We are asking for a one year commitment (with a 90 day probation period to see if the fit is good with our Board of Directors).

We welcome your application and inquiries for this position. We will do a background check (criminal and credit), as this is a position of responsibility.

You can request an application at salvationmountaininc31@gmail.com. Be sure to let us know that you saw our Help Wanted ad on Coleen’s Workers On Wheels website when you contact us about this site manager job. Salvation Mountain Inc. – Slab City, California. Posted June 2013.

I’m mulling it over.  Given my current situation and the violence $400 a month would do to my series of debt responsibilities it might be I could stand the heat.  Going to have a long prayer meeting with the cats to find out whether they’re willing to allow having a look.

13 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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