Still recovering.

View 713 Sunday, February 12, 2012

I spent the day thinking well, I am recovering, why am I not working? But I didn’t get much done. I do think I am recovering and I hope to wake up tomorrow without the sore throat and headache and just get on with it.

Tonight’s Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theater George V soap opera, had an outbreak of the Spanish Flu go through the mansion just after the end of the war. At least we don’t have that here. But it has not been a cheerful weekend.

With one exception. Thanks to all of you who have responded to the Pledge Drive with new subscriptions or renewals. I talked a lot about pledges and subscriptions last night, and if you really need a sermon you can go there and read it. It is of course the same message you always get. This place operates on the KUSC Public Radio model. It’s free, but if I don’t get subscriptions and renewals it won’t stay open. I don’t talk constantly about money and subscriptions, but I reserve the right to hound you a bit during the week when KUSC, the LA good music station, is running its pledge drive, and this is the week, so you get that message. If you’ve been around a while and you’ve been meaning to subscribe but just haven’t got around to it, now would be a great time to do it. And thanks to all those who do subscribe.

The Pentagon is opening up the question of women in the military, and as usual the debate is generally over the wrong questions. It’s one thing to say that women can be at combat headquarters, and quite another to say that with current regulations women can be combat infantrymen. The current physical qualifications are different for men and women; and there’s the rub.

It takes great physical strength to carry a comrade in full kit any distance at all. It’s difficult enough for men. It’s impossible for a great number of women who have passed the women’s physical qualification tests. There are other reasons. It’s one thing to review the physical qualifications for some occupational specialties to see just are the physical requirements, and quite another to simply declare that they aren’t relevant. I don’t want to open a big can of worms here, but it seems obvious that some combat occupations simply take strength, and general infantry is one of them. I think of some artillery posts that require upper body strength as well. And while we aren’t likely to have bayonet charges in modern warfare, it’s pretty clear that women aren’t going to be as good at close combat as men.

There are no rules that prevent women from playing in the NBA, although the rules don’t let men play in the WNBA. I presume that women boxers could step up and try to participate in boxing, or professional football, and I expect that some might be as good at it as some men are now, but still –

We’ll see what happens, but I do not think that imposing some kind of entitlement strategy on the legions is a good idea.

We have had a developing situation that puts a spotlight on the Los Angeles education system. On the one hand there is incontrovertible evidence that at least one and probably several teachers in a Los Angeles grade school were involved in some very strange perversions involving third grade children. On the other we have the memory of the McMartin case and its accompanying witch hunts in Los Angeles. At one time everyone believed any child who accused any adult, to the point where, in the McMartin case, impossible events were taken as true. The way the children were questioned made it almost certain that they would accuse someone of something, since they would be hounded until they did; and no, I am not making that up. And in the McMartin case at one point there were stories of bodies being buried on the school grounds, and archeological teams went out digging. Some investigators took seriously charges that the children were transported to Forest Lawn Cemetery and made to witness burials, although the logistics of transporting an entire class, many of whom had no memory of the event, and getting them to Glendale and back to Manhattan Beach in LA traffic were never discussed, and no one could be found who actually saw the busses – except of course the children who were telling the story.

For those who don’t know about the crazy witch hunts of the 1980’s this may make no sense, but believe, me, they happened, and in those days the voodoo scientists – excuse me, child psychologists – had elaborate theories about how the children weren’t really able to make up stories like that, so there had to be grains of truth in them. There were also implanted memories. The notion that a psychologist could implant memories in young children was met with scorn until one defense psychologist showed that the child witness could actually be induced to remember being molested – by the judge, whom she had never seen before the trial began. Actually, the technique of implanting memories in young children is fairly simply and easily accomplished, although the ethical implications of implanting false memories as a means of demonstrating the technique are severe enough that few want to do it.

The problem then is that on the one hand the teachers need some protection from slander – they are after all facing professional ruin if not jail – and on the other the children need protection from pederasts who have managed to get into classrooms. In the latest LA case it gets even more complicated. It’s unlikely that some of the teachers in this one school were unaware that something strange was going on. It’s even less likely that all the teachers in that school had their suspicions.

I doubt that this mess will result in a real reform, because the LA school system is so corrupted that it almost certainly has to be abolished and rebuilt from scratch, but it may be that we will learn something from what’s going on here.

I suspect I am rambling. It hasn’t been a pleasant day.