Trap Door

You're in for a treat, gentle reader.

In a burst of shameless nostalgia, I present Episode 1 of Trapdoor.

Trapdoor was a cult favourite that was around in the late 80s.

It was screened in Australia by the ABC, and was essential viewing for my kids.

The show was created by Terry Brain and Charlie Mills, both British animators.

The full series is available on YouTube here.

Enjoy...... 

Billy Joel - Goodnight Saigon

This Billy Joel Song is one of my favourites.

Here are the lyrics -

We met as soul mates
On Parris Island
We left as inmates
From an asylum
And we were sharp
As sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho
To lay down our lives

We came in spastic
Like tameless horses
We left in plastic
As numbered corpses
And we learned fast
To travel light
Our arms were heavy
But our bellies were tight

We had no home front
We had no soft soap
They sent us Playboy
They gave us Bob Hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to Jesus Christ
With all of our might

We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our Doors tapes
And it was dark
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we'd write
And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Remember Charlie
Remember Baker
They left their childhood
On every acre
And who was wrong?
And who was right?
It didn't matter in the thick of the fight

We held the day
In the palm
Of our hand
They ruled the night
And the night
Seemed to last as long as six weeks
On Parris Island

We held the coastline
They held the highlands
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of our motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive
And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Joel described the song in this way -

Time has a way of healing wounds or making them easier to look at to see if they've scabbed up. The guys came home from Vietnam and that's it? It doesn't end until these guys are absorbed into the mainstream and we deal with our feelings about it.

(Parris Island is a marine recruit training depot).

It's Time

This interview with Carl Bernstein is deeply disturbing. Watch it to the end, gentle reader.

Bernstein has been around a long time, and is in a great position to comment on the current situation in his country. His activity back in 1972 was fundamental to uncovering a conspiracy which ultimately destroyed a presidency. He recognises criminality when he sees it.

A criminal president was forced to leave office in 1974, on the basis of the evidence uncovered by Carl Bernstein and his colleague, Bob Woodward.  Back then, the American system, with its checks and balances, worked.

Now, with another criminal president caught in conspiracy, it may not. His party has to a large extent, put the pursuit of power ahead of the rights of the American people, and it may cause the checks and balances to be overwhelmed.

The corruption of the Supreme Court is ominous. With Trump's recent stacking of the court, it is now a political agency rather than an independent judiciary. Clearly, one major cornerstone of the separation of powers, has been removed. There's a pretty good chance that the whole institutional edifice which constitutes a viable state, will collapse.

What does this mean for Australia?

As one Australian who lived the consequences of our alliance with the United States, I don't underestimate how the corruption of the American Union can affect our future security.

Let's imagine a scenario. Let's assume that Trump, or someone with his populist appeal is elected in 2024. Let's assume that a corrupt Republican senate and congress also takes power. (Incidentally, it matters little whether such an administration is Democrat or Republican, the white-anting of their institutions will have the same effect).

Let's imagine that under this populist government, the US reverts to its historically default position on international affairs, that of isolationism. Trump was heading in that direction, but wasn't in power long enough to make enduring changes.

Should this occur, we would be on our own, diplomatically and strategically. Given the diverging path between current US values and ours, it's probably an inevitability. Whether you look at the contrast between our laws on gun control, capital punishment, abortion, climate change, social welfare, etc, this divergence is rapidly becoming stark. 

As a nation, we simply need to come to terms with a future where we may be on our own. Given the rapid and escalating assertiveness of China, and the return to the use of military aggression in Europe, that situation holds serious threats for our security.

Perhaps our model could be Israel. We need to develop a completely independent military, designed to defend our country, rather than to join a powerful ally in offshore adventures such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Our procurement of military hardware and our deployment and organisation of force structure needs to reflect this new reality. Sovereign independence goes well beyond military self-reliance, as the Israelis have demonstrated, but that's where it starts.

Hugh White has had much to say about this. Our force structure, he suggests, should be based on maritime denial. We do, after all, have the moats of the Pacific and Indian Oceans in our favour. Why do we need long range nuclear submarines if we're defending our coastline? They (and our large amphibious vessels) are better suited to projection of power thousands of kilometres from our land mass in support of great power conflict. Because we have these large ships, we need expensive small ships to defend them.

We should have four times the number of submarines, not necessarily nuclear, as they are the most cost effective bulwark against surface aggressors. In addition, we need missiles and drones as well as a much larger fleet of fighters. 

Why do we need tanks that can't be moved quickly across our enormous land mass? If we ever had to use them in anger on this continent, it would already be too late. Recent events in Ukraine demonstrate their vulnerability. 

Western global dominance is on the way out, whether we like it or not. It's time we acknowledged this inconvenient fact, and did something about it. That "something" begins with increasing our defence capability. 

The Shotgun Amendment

 

Image courtesy tvtropes.

Maybe, in light of the recent SCOTUS decision, it's time for the US to consider a 28th amendment to their constitution.

After all, they regard their constitution as sacred, and those celebrating the recent decision claim the preservation of human life as their major rationale. 

They use the same logic to justify access to firearms through the second amendment. The most common justification is that possession of a firearm guarantees the individual protection against attack from somebody or something evil. That evil could be construed as a lifetime of poverty and suffering for mother and child as the consequence of this Roe v. Wade reversal.

The SCOTUS decision, as well as protecting the rights of the unborn child, also impinges on the rights of the mother. Unless immaculate conception is possible in the US, that unborn child will always have a father.

That father, in a moral world, has the same responsibility for the life of his child as does the mother who will, under this decision, be forced to bear that child. One very simple question should be asked. Why should the total responsibility for the well being of that child be vested only in the mother? 

Currently in the US, maternity leave, public support for single mothers, and services such as child care, kindergarten and preschool are patchy at best, and in some neighbourhoods, almost non-existent. These are the neighbourhoods where access to contraception for the disadvantaged segments of the population is also difficult. It's a self-perpetuating problem and this decision will ensure it continues.

The upshot of this situation is that the mother's life is fundamentally changed, her access to an income jeopardised, and when the child is born, she assumes total responsibility. 

By any measure, this is simply unfair, and now that the state has decided that abortion is no longer an option, the situation has changed utterly.

If the state can decide what happens to a woman's body, it would seem only reasonable and just that some kind of caveat be placed over the conduct of the other partner in the creation of that baby, its father.

The amendment (hereafter called the Shotgun Amendment) would go something like this -

Once paternity is established (and that is not difficult) the father would be compelled to contribute to the support of the child. This could be organised at a local level through paternity courts which would be established for the purpose. There would be debate about how the nature and duration of the support would be established, but working that out would not be rocket science. A contribution code could be established.

And of course, it would be called The Shotgun Amendment.

With the introduction of a firearm metaphor into the title, the NRA would love it....

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A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

This is a very informative image, and it does indeed say a thousand words.

It shows the rapidly widening gap between profits and wages in Australia.

It also reflects the structural changes that have occured in the nation's economy during the last ten years. There changes are the culmination of a comprehensive and enduring power shift between organised labour and the corporate sector.

There are many reasons for this. Domestically, they include government policy across the last ten years directed towards weakening the power of trade unions and their capacity to use bargaining power.

Globalisation, with its investment in technology, its capacity to export jobs to low paying nations and its facility to exploit a pool of low-paid, often imported labour all contribute.

The conventional wisdom that worker's pay will increase in line with productivity has also begun to fail, as can be seen on the graph below.

This is US data, but the Australian trend is similar.

These are very dangerous trends which if history is any guide, will lead to unrest, and quite likely violence. Or, to be hopeful, the correction may occur as the result of government led reform. 

 

In the meantime, all any of us can do is to encourage our millennial offspring to join a union. At least that evens up the power balance a little, and ensures that wage theft (which for some industries now constitutes a business model) is unlikely.

When I've done this, I've also advised my children not to tell their employer that they've joined a union. In some sectors this will be a bad career move. 

That's pretty sad.

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A Back Story

What we carried all those years ago.

I've been living with lumbar spondylosis for fifty-two years now, and have become accustomed to the adjustments necessary. 

The most recent being having to sell my pride and joy because getting in and out of it was becoming (literally) a pain. 

The damage was done in the first half of 1970, when we were patrolling in the far north of Phuoc Tuy province searching for the elusive Viet Cong, whom by this time, had been cleaned out of most areas in the south and east of the province.

To do this, we had to move through the scrub with about a third of our body weight on our backs, and a heavy weapon in our hands. Back then, it was acknowledged that soldiers were for hanging things on. In the dry, we had to carry a comprehensive supply of water, sufficient to last the three to five days between resupplies, unless we happened upon a flowing stream.  

Flowing streams weren't around between March and July in that part of the world.

The other back damage was done when we jumped out of choppers upon insertion into a new AO*, as the machine didn't always actually land to let us out. Sometimes they hovered about a metre from the ground, and we had to do the magic leap, hopefully landing on our feet before fanning out from the LZ#.

I've been lucky, not needing back surgery, as a couple of ex section mates have. One is into a routine of admissions to hospital many times annually, when the degenerating spine plays up. Age is exacerbating the problem for all of us.

The reason I didn't get to this stage was an early diagnosis, and a regime of back care, regular strengthening exercises, and the discipline of avoiding injury. It is indeed a discipline, as you have to maintain your mindfulness, and not get carried away when lifting is necessary. This is why it took two months to move from one home to another when we downsized earlier this year.

The downside to this was ownership of two homes at once (one more than we needed) and a delay in the sale of the older larger one. Fingers crossed... we have a contract of sale signed.

Historically, a complicating factor in my case was my chosen occupation. I went immediately into special education after discharge in 1971, which meant I was working with kids with physical disabilities. This was OK when I was in a big school with plenty of ancillary staff, but when, in 1980, I was posted to my first principalship of a small school with two female teacher aides, it meant that much of the manual handling of the larger boys fell to me. Two of them were actually heavier than I was, and after a year of the daily routine of lifting and transferring them, back pain sent me to my GP.

He referred me to an orthopaedic specialist who breezilly told me that if I continued to do what I had been doing, I'd be in a wheelchair within five years. Fortunately, an appointment to a non-teaching principalship in a larger school happened at exactly the right time, and I soldiered on. I had, as they say in the classics, been given a "heads up", so was very careful after that.

After retirement, I submitted a claim to DVA, but was initially told that my back injury was a result of my teaching career and the claim rejected. A persistent advocate (who went to the lengths of accessing military records to prove what my unit was doing at the time) eventually got the claim recognised, and I received a small pension. Gold card arrived at seventy, and now my treatment is free, and DVA gym sessions are helpful.

The lesson in this is that pretty much anyone who has spent time on operational service in infantry has a damaged spine (and probably knees and ankles as well). We weren't built to lug all our worldly possessions on our backs for weeks at a time.

I'm not sure whether the situation has improved for modern infantry. Somehow I doubt it, as these days they wear body armour. The closest we got to that was an occasional issue of flak jackets, if mines were considered a possibility, and we were aboard APCs. These jackets were heavy and uncomfortable in the Vietnamese humidity.

*Area of operations.

#Landing zone. 

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Matthew McConaughey's Speech

This should be required viewing for all NRA members, and in this country for the people who advocate slackening our National Firearms Agreement.

It's powerful stuff....

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