Modern Day Village Idiots: The Eloi

Wilder: The Kids Aren't Alright: Mental Health

 Sorry JW, but you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope here.

"44% of high school students feel persistent sadness or hopelessness"

So, have you talked with current high school students?

That only 44% feel persistent sadness or hopelessness tells me that at least another 40% have a vastly inflated opinion of themselves and their abilities.

They can't read (or write) a note in cursive. They can't tell time on a dial-face timepiece. They don't know their own phone number. They can't make exact change for a $10 order without taking off their shoes, and calling two of their lifelines.

For F--K SAKE man, I see this Every. Single. Day!

This is simple sh*t we were taught to do by first grade, and these are high school juniors and seniors. Or for that matter, freshmen and sophomores in college, AKA 13th and 14th grade.

They can't write a book report, can't construct a coherent paragraph, can't multiply to 12x12 without a TI-84 and seven lectures on higher mathematics, and they treat the ability to sit through a 90-minute movie without talking or checking their phones like it's a freaking Jedi Masterclass.

They can tell you what Taylor Swift wore to the Video Music Awards, but they couldn't pick Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, or the Parthenon out of a line-up.

They can't put any three basic major historical events in order, find any city, state, or country on a globe (even if you spot them a hint of which continent it's on), or in most cases, find their own asses with both hands, an anatomical chart, and a rear-view mirror.

If you stranded them 5 miles into the desert between a rotary dial phonebooth and a stack of change, and a gassed-up car with a stick shift and the key in the ignition, 99% of them would die right there of starvation and exposure.

They should all be flunked back to kindergarten at their high school graduations, and then retry each level until they attain mastery at an 80% score. About 1% would be done in a week. For the rest, they'd be there seven days a week from 6AM to noon. Then they'd be given not a diploma, but a pair of stout leather work gloves, to dig ditches, shovel shit, and sort garbage at the dump from noon until 8PM, to earn room and board - in a tent, fed the same menu prison inmates get - to take them permanently out of mommy and daddy's tender embraces. No cell phones. No calculators. For anyone not advancing any grade level after two tries, the daily beatings would commence. Every fall they'd replace migrant workers picking vegetables in the fields until they graduated fair and square. In the winter they'd shovel snow on the roads by hand, and in summer they'd be spreading tar and filling potholes, until they finally graduated. Then and only then would they be granted the full privileges of citizenship. They could escape only upon graduation, or by enlistment in the military (the Air Force wouldn't count, and they don't take non-h.s. grads anyways). Those choosing the military option would not be allowed out of the military until they'd earned at least a GED.

When they finally graduated from one or the other for real, they'd have something about which to feel happy and proud, probably for the first time in their lives. Universities and community colleges would cease to offer remedial primary and secondary school education, and go back to teaching actual college subjects full-time.

Until something close to that happens, most high school students should be told they're the exact idiots they are 24/7/365 until they can disprove it, with a properly-footnoted 20-page hand-written research paper, and deliver a defense of that thesis before the faculty of the local high school.

The numbers you speak of come from the most mollycoddled bunch of unskilled lackwits in the history of the world. (We can talk about the mass floggings and/or tar-and-featherings of the teachers and administrators who helped create them at some point in the future.)

Fans of science fiction know these kids as H.G. Wells' Eloi.

Anything which makes them feel like exactly the oxygen thieves they are is a good thing.

Anything which whips and beats them towards the finish line of improving that situation and becoming functional human beings is even better. 

Another Day, Another Douchebadge

The first half of this video simply shows another badged lying sack-of-shit @$$hole who desperately needs to be unemployed, prosecuted, and imprisoned.

Which is about as rare in this country as grass lawns.

I can count half a dozen felonies and misdemeanors Officer Jackboots committed in a few minutes, and there's no reason why he hasn't been fired and frog-marched to jail, already, except for institutionalized corruption and brazen bureaucratic stonewalling of the obvious.

Sleep tight, America. Officer Douchebadge is on the case.

Sunday Music: Jane

From the thirdish iteration of Jefferson Starship, the newly Grace Slick-less group's hard-rocking Top 20 hit from 1979.

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

 

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

FIFY

h/t WRSA 

Re-Cert B.S. in progress. Light posting.

I'm currently working under my 20th CPR card, my 15th ACLS and PALS cards, and - thank a merciful Heaven - only my 8th TNCC cert, because that only has to be re-certified every four years, rather than every two. So in the pages of the latest edition of that last manual is where I'll be for most of the next couple of days. Proctored by someone who's been in the business for a third as long as I have, and stopped doing hands-on nursing of any sort five years ago. Sideways, with a rusty chainsaw to that nonsense.

I get that things change, and I'm fine with having initiates learn this the first time or two. The rest is something that could be covered in an online video and check-off box, unless someone has notably effed up for reals. Think of how jackassical it would be to force your plumber to re-learn plumbing every few years, after they'd been doing it for a career.

Beyond a certain point, you're not teaching, least of all anything really new; you're just flogging a dead horse in pursuit of rent checks for the certification agencies and entities, most of whom haven't practiced anything medical at the bedside with real patients in decades.

So who's kidding who here?

Let's cut the bullshit, and just call this a Ponzi scheme, powered by grift and shakedowns, from The State to The Agency to The Hospital to The Department, and just let me write you a suitable check to leave me the hell alone, and tell you to fuck right off and let me get back to doing my job without the Good Idea Fairies and Clipboard Commandos justifying their existence at the expense of both my precious time and earned-by-sweat-and-blood paycheck. Would $50 be enough to make that pay off all around?

Oh, sorry. A little too on-the-nose there, was I?

Back to the textbook...

But wait! There's MORE!

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

Community Policing

Divemedic has a couple of relevant posts. Go and read them, if you haven't already.

My 2¢ to those who defend the police and policing we have, and have had, for some good time:

---------

"The media lies" is a cop out. (No pun intended.)

We know - because we've seen the videos - what happens when a citizen screws up; anything from a quick concrete tune-up up to and including sidewalk execution (and frequently justified).

But when it isn't, the commensurate number of videos and stories of police officers getting walked out of their department like Chuck Connors at the opening of Branded, 

                         

and subsequently frog-marched into a squad car, convicted at trial, and ass-raped to death in prison afterwards should be similarly legion for the times when they screw up.

They are no such thing, nor anywhere close, because that almost never happens. You should police yourselves more harshly than the rest of us, but instead you don't do so, or do so barely at all, and only when the transgression is so egregious and virally seen as to be a virtual white-hot fireplace poker up administration's ass to push it forward.

And before Rodney King, it was twenty times worse.

The only thing that should be scarier than an ordinary citizen breaking the law, should be the spectacle of the mills of justice grinding an officer who's transgressed. Punishment should be draconian, and more fearsome than being kidnapped by drug cartels.

Instead, it's mainly wrist slaps, if it happens at all, and even then, mainly only honored in the breach. That's why departments have lists of officers with 10, 20, 50 verified major screw-ups, and even fired officers just drift to other departments, and rack up serial bad conduct rap sheets without the hammer falling until they kill somebody or make the national news, rather than being black-balled from the profession for life.

What sticks in everyone's craw isn't that the media gives cops a bad rap, it's that every police department in America uses the Catholic Church's example for dealing with child-molesting priests as their disciplinary model: sweep it under the rug, and pretend it never happened. The lump is now the height of Mt. McKinley, and that plan isn't working for you like it once did.

If it were otherwise, the blogs and YouTube videos of the hazing other officers would deliver, let alone official (metaphorical) floggings-around-the-fleet by management would be more numerous than the bad cop videos, by orders of magnitude.

That they aren't shows that the whole blue gang is in on the con, and the availability of anyone with a cell phone camera to be Paramount Pictures and CNN has shown the truth of the matter.

So has the dearth of officers going on strike for cleaner departments, or quitting and/or whistleblowing because they can't stand the corruption and mollycoddling of their fellow thugs and crooks in blue. 

That behavior is what earns Divemedic's percentage: misprision of felony, accessory after the fact, criminal conspiracy. In the penal codes of 50 states and 7 US territories.

But apparently, they don't cover this in any police academy in the nation, except with a wink and a nudge.

(And telling me about one or two exceptions doesn't disprove the other two million that never happened. Statistics are a bitch like that.)

You guys are a blue gang, pure and simple, with a Mafia-like code of silence regarding in-house problems, from simple screw-ups to criminal conspiracies and organizational corruption, and when confronted, you shrug and mumble, and walk away. If nobody got caught, it never happened.

Frank Serpico remains a cautionary tale, from coast to coast, bottom to top, and even then, only for people old enough to remember the story.

That's why nobody trusts you, and why nobody likes you. Your entire profession has squandered any trust and integrity you ever had, collectively, and you'll never get that back, short of figuratively (or literally, at this point) putting the heads of defaulters on pikes at the doors of the station house.

That would be a good start. And I'm not exaggerating.

And at the rate things are going, the people - all of them, good and the bad - are going to start doing that for you, to drive the point well home, even knowing what that means for society for some good time. You're a cure that's become far worse than the disease.

That truth may hurt, but the sting doesn't disprove the thesis.

"90% of cops are bad" is wrong.

It's probably 9% too low.

Your profession has made its bed.

Very soon now, they're going to see what it feels like to lie in it.

And the entire society will pay.

It's always the people you trust the most who fuck you the worst, and stab you in the back the hardest.

Because they're the only ones who can.

Et tu, Flatfoot?

GMTA Dept.: Hot off the presses - Evolution Of The American Police State

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

Dirty Jobs: Be A Man Among Men

 

Halloween Treat: A Haunting In Venice

Kenneth Branagh's first outing as Agatha Christie's brilliant sleuth Hercule Poirot was in Murder On The Orient Express in 2017, but was hopelessly overshadowed by the original 1974 film by Sidney Lumet, which was the last movie made of her works to gain Christie's full personal approval. Albert Finney was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal, Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for it, and the flick is a cinematic classic.

Branagh followed that up by remaking Death On The Nile for a COVID-delayed 2022 release, this time comparing unfavorably with Peter Ustinov in a career tentpole role in the 1978 film, playing Poirot flawlessly in the first of six movies, three onscreen, and three for TV. Even Branagh couldn't compete with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, and Lois Chiles getting her head blown off half a dozen times in different flashbacks, and he probably shouldn't have tried.

This time, Branagh selected Christie's Hallowe'en Party as the novel to loosely base this film on in his third outing as Poirot, a book which no one else has adapted for the screen before. It was an excellent choice, and he has finally hit his stride.

If you're a fan of old Hollywood, and want to see a solid whodunit, perfectly selected for a Halloween season release, with a solid cast, clever plot twists, by a brilliant actor/director, and with none of the woketarded nonsense that infects currently and happily on-strike Hollyweird and every piece of crap they burp out, preferring instead great entertainment for your time and money, this is your movie.

Branagh's earlier attempts had him doing the role of Poirot well, but not superbly, and making decent remakes, but it wasn't anything like career-best work, certainly not up to his earlier standards, and comparing second-best even to the earlier versions.

A Haunting In Venice is more like his work back in his Henry V days, when at 29 he was rightfully described as the Orson Welles of the era, and for which film he was nominated for Oscars for both Best Actor and Best Director, back when the award denoted actual merit. If he keeps churning out adaptations of Christie's novels and playing Poirot like this, he will be back on that perch to stay.

Rating: ★★★★ - Enthusiastically recommended. And frankly, the best flick of the paltry four offerings we've bothered to see this year, to date. You should only go if you like good movies.