Space Force 7

It’s not that I’m worldly and intelligent and astute of global affairs. But the reality is that you are in fact a dumbshit who comes to me to know what to do with your mutually hell-forsaken life. So do your dirty work as quietly as you can, and while you receive $5,280 for every one of your billed hours, I will ride like a sumbitch, I will carve up the waves and the asphalt and pull an eleven-second quarter mile at whatever place actually does a functional job of replacing Bandimere.

You can’t ride like me, but you can ride close enough to how I ride that you’ll be able to fool most of the people most of the time. And that will pay for your dumb-ass $140,000 nerd-mobile.

So for what it’s worth, in comparison to your dumb-ass, I am just a slightly less intense dipshit that you are, and so you come to me so you can learn how to fix this mess that you and your’n have created.

First off, most of the people who have anything to say about Israel and Palestine are not in harms way. They do not have to fear an Israeli mortar or phosphorus come through their roof, they do not have to fear some crazy terrorist kidnap them, rape them and leave their decapitated body in alley, they do not have fear the whump-whump sound of a heavy lift helicopter, or hope for the whump-whump of that same heavy lift helicopter to get them out of a burning mayhem. No sir, most of the people who have anything to say about Palestine and Israel will not be awoken tonight by the sound of a rocket, or a gunshot, or a dream where you heard her actual voice, and you woke up at 3:00 am and for a moment, she was still there, still able to make new memories.

The folks look at the ideological sparring as a kind of popularity contest. Their most common fear is not being blown to bits in a war, but rather choosing the wrong side. They will drive media views to one side or the other, they will increase market share, their eyeballs will drive defense industry profits here or possibly there. If their eyeballs drive the defense industry profits here, then the folks up on the sixteenth floor will get their payday. If they eyeballs drive the defense industry profits there, then the folks up on the thirteenth floor will get their payday. But both sides will belly up to their blame game, because it’s all they really know how to do, ultimately. Having not been properly trained in the subtle craft of nation-building, they are forced to revert to our common entropically-derived default of tearing things to shit.

Israel fucked up sometime after I was there.

I was there in the 1980s and the results of accepting Arafat as a political leader had flowered into a peace in the West Bank, to where I could walk all over Palestine and my biggest danger was making too many friends in the engine-tuner community. Back when I was there, the Palestinian kids tuned those indestructable Japanese shitboxes into performance machines, and they did at least five years before it got big in the USA. They were broke enough to have to build their own cold-air intakes out of scrap aluminum, use Bondo like a religious talisman, and of course, put the Palestinian flag over the hoods because Palestine represents. I never got to see a race with the Israeli tuners, but the borders were pretty damned open when I was there, at least around Jerusalem. There wasn’t a lot of terrorism because the hopelessness was gone for a time. Palestinians saw their futures in a United Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Unfortunately, I was just too far outside of that culture to get into the Israeli tuner garages. Half of the Israeli tuners had grown up in places like Long Island anyway. And they tuned better quality cars than the Palestinians, but they didn’t win all of those races. Some of those little Palestinian Datsuns had a lot of weight stripped out of them, the engine had been rebuilt twice to run deep into redline, and they just kicked ass. And it was a long time ago, so my memory is not complete, but if I remember correctly, the government at that time was working to add a minimum drinking age, apparently because Israeli teens were getting shitfucked on Macabee beer and racing drunk. Talk about a “peacetime problem”!

The point is, the Palestinians one both sides of the saddle saw a future for themselves in the emerging regional economy.

And then, that went to shit, jobs disappeared, the defense industry and the terrorism industry started to hire workers again, and there was inevitably a compliant dupe somewhere would do some terrorism and get the wars going again. It’s the nature of the folks up on the sixteenth floor.

Yes, they will fill a town square in support of Palestine and another town square in support of Israel, and what they accomplish better than anything else is to provide accurate, real-time data of public sentiment so that the folks in contracting know if they should send the work order up to the sixteenth floor of the thirteenth floor.

Israel fucked up sometime after I was there, and they didn’t get hold of their reactionaries who want to burn down Israel and Palestine together to bring their demented religious fairy tales to life. The Christians have their version, the Jews have their version, the Muslims have their version, and Israel fucked up by not getting ahead of the religious zealots with guns.

But here we are, and that was then, this is now, so what to do?

1. Israel accepts the Hamas ceasefire. Yes, it sucks, they kicked ass and now they have power, but sometimes you gotta call an Arafat because children have a right not to have their lives blown to shit by a bunch of ideologically-motivated ne’er do wells who claim to hold the moral high ground.
2. Israel accepts that some of the these terrorists are going to rebrand themselves as elected leaders. Yes sucks, but that’s on you, the kids didn’t have any part in this.
3. Hamas, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority all pledge to disengage from their border walls. If Egypt wants to get on board and disengage from their border wall, that would be helpful to their place in the emerging regional economic development. But if Jordan decides against disengagement from their border walls, then I am sufficiently-experienced experienced in the craft of nation-building that I am quite sure none of this will work. But, as one of the only consistently coherent and structured governments in the region, I believe that Jordan will disngage from their border walls when they can get some reliable contracts from Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas will then be pressed with some tough choices, because the future of Gaza is democratic-republic, and if they expect to hold down their end with Egypt and Israel, they will have to find a way to keep the hotheads in check.
4. Gaza needs at least two deep-water ports and investment into employee-owned port facilities and services. The ownership of that industry is already in Gaza, and they already have the expertise to modernize and automate the port operations. With disengagement from the border walls, the industry and local businesses can then work to remove the barriers, build cross-border commerce and get the land-bridge cargo conduit through the industrial center of Gaza, through Israel, through the West Bank, into the regional logistics in Jordan for destinations in Iraq, UAE, Saudia, and ideally build the return conduit from Yemen. Would it be cheaper to build an alternate water route? Maybe, but that’s not the point. Egypt runs the Suez Canal with world-class efficiency, and it has a sufficient capacity. Egypt has already committed to major investments into capacity upgrades. A land bridge offers a commitment to environmental stewardship and the ability to upgrade at a much lower cost than a canal. Initially, the land bridge could encompass existing roadways and treaty-defined border crossings. That can be upgraded between logistic mounts with rail, and then potentially using fenced-off zones for cargo transport using Wing-in-Ground Effect cargo planes that operate close to the ground and offer one of the most advantageous weight-time metrics in the industry. The only thing that we can all know for certain of the land bridge, is that it will have very little freshwater. But TITME, right? This is the Middle East, and we must do what we must do. To get to there from here, means dropping the blame game, as I carefully instructed the Security Council more than once. And yes R., if you’re reading this, I know it was you who called U.N. Security on me and told them I wrote graffiti on one of the Chagals in the Secretariat. First off, I would never write on someone else’s canvas, because I’m not as good as Jean-Michel. Even in the tunnels, I don’t write over other tags. But you had to have known that my motorcycle was broken then, so I rode my Snakeboard to the Secretariat for about a month. I guess it was a good joke in retrospect. But back then, I was hugely honored to be able to speak in front of the Security Council. I found myself in one of the security offices, I’m playing with my little Palm Pilot, those were big back then. The security guards were running all over the Secretariat to confirm that I hadn’t spoofed the cameras and drawn on one of the Chagals. And before they were even done, Eddy comes in and tells them to let me go, I was supposed to speak in front of the Security Council. The guard there looked like this kind of thing happened every day. Some skatepunk being held on suspicion of defacing a Chagal is also wanted in the Security Council? The guard says to Eddy, “bring him back here when you’re done with him.” And Eddy did it! After the whole shebang, I had the representative from Namibia offering to buy me a drink, a really great looking gal from one of the European delegations, she’s trying to get my ear. And Eddy tells everyone “I have to take him back to the guard’s office. I figure I can get back to the cocktail event before that woman from the European delegation leaves, so I rush back to the guard’s office, he and Eddy looked like they moved a bit slower than usual. He tells me everything is fine and they are going to look into who made the call. I leave Eddy there talking to the guard, and I run back down the main hallway past all the Chagalls and up to the delegate dining room, but she was gone. “Stole the only girl I loved, drowned her deep inside of me.” So I drank with the dude from Namibia. He turned out to be pretty chill, definitely from one of the old German families in Windhoek. He adored the Oshiwambo culture. He was still employed by the Namibian government of the time, so he could come right out as lover of the native culture, but he didn’t do much to hide it either. I looked into his family at some point, they still lived outside of Windhoek, and they’re comfortable, but they divested of most of their property as a family. I thought that was pretty neat, a generation of kids raised in the way of humanism and they walked the walk. I digress … my point is that I warned the Security Council to just stop wasting valuable time on their blame game. Most of the time they ignore me, some of the time they don’t. And when they don’t ignore me, they get things done. Treaties get teeth over the real enemy, which is not each other, but poverty.
5. There will inevitably be some trickle-through terrorism in Israel, but it’s better than the avalanche of it that triggered this war. And it will be painful when we lose those who we love to stay committed to peace. But sometimes we have to put aside our pain and anger to give children a chance at a future. This isn’t their war.

The image is from the opening of Blade Runner. The future was full of flare gas, the image told us. Even in an era with off-world pleasure resorts and simulated humans that cried over lost love, the industries of Earth had still not found a way to capture flare gas.

But then, how boring would that visual have been, with flare gas neatly captured into CNG tanks, and processed or combusted as needed? The visual of flare gas is a good one because humans have enjoyed the safety of fire since the days of Zarathustra … fire gave us protection from all those things that devoured us in the darkness. Fire allowed us to become more than animals, we could become human; we could dream a tomorrow where our bones were not scraped dry the beaks of buzzards.

But now we have LED light bulbs, and the flare gas whelps into the air with a determined kind of meaninglessness. The gas serves no purpose, it warms no kettles, it powers no engines, it sears no meat. The gas is ignited, so much spilling of one’s seed, ineffectual and pointless.

But the industry has decided that well-head compression is too expensive for the value of the product. And thus flare gas is vented and ignited from coast to coast, from the banks of landfills to the outcry of gas wells on the East Coast and oil wells on the West Coast and a mixture in between.

Flare Trap saw the reality of this dirty truth and also saw a market that could make it work. So they made the Flare Trap cheap by design. It had to meet about $1 per liquid pound of payback after about a thousand or two thousand pounds of product captured and sold. It isn’t the industry that was Flare Trap’s market, it was the rednecks that were Flare Trap’s market. It was those men and women who didn’t mind babysitting the capture setup until it was dialed in, because they would find a way to convert that CNG to dollars in their pocket.

Yes, the constitution of the gas varies depending on location. But natural gas is the new feedstock of the energy-hustle. And the carbon-negative natural gas captured at the flare trap is a notably valuable feedstock. What they do with it is up to the redneck in question;

1. Separate out the propane, butane and ethane for higher value sales,
2. Combust the filtered and cleaned gas to a favorable methane content,
3. Flare the gas in a useful way, like for gas drying and,
4. Something else.

A common pressure rating for CNG tanks is about 3600 psi. The value proposition builds on that, the cost of the tank, the type and cost of the tank, for instance a Type 4 fiberglass tank that costs a few hundred dollars, and the CNG-compliant compressor from the Flare Trap to the storage tank.

Throw a softball into a Convention and Rednecks, and it will bounce off the noggins of at least ten of them who picked up scrap metal the day before and sold it for gas to get them to where the booze is free. That’s the unstoppable power of the Redneck Army. If they have the tools to capture flare gas, damned if they won’t capture flare gas, and then find a way to sell it, or use it to run their truck.

A few decades ago, back when I lived in Syndey, I came back from the States with a toasty Giardia infection that I most definitely picked up from a pristine spring near High Falls, New York. It didn’t impact any of the locals there, but when I was a kid and drank water our of polluted mountain streams, my intestinal plants and animals apparently made a peace treaty with Rocky Mountain Giardia that did not offer reciprocation status with Upstate New York Giardia.

So I’m shitting my brains out in my tastefully-furnished apartment in Potts Point, and I sez to my self “self, you are gonna die if this goes on too much longer.” I head to the doctor … or at least I assumed it was a doctor. But it was Australia and that was no doctor.

I walk into this doctor’s office, told him what I just told y’all, and he tells me to stop eating any food at all for 24 hours. “Mate, you kin have an oice-pop, or a feezy drink, but na food. Twinny-four hours. You got it?”

Quack. Whatever.

I go back to my tasteful apartment in Sydney, and I really do need to share, how lovely was that flat. It was the apartment that Gidget used to make a gin and tonic for a pro surfer on the Duke Kahanamoku tour. I’m sitting on the toilet in my tasteful apartment with Sally Fields and Miki in the living room, my Prime American Male Body veering unavoidably to the same death that kills one-in-ten Haitian children. That’s what diarrhea does when it is left untreated. I avoid eating for half the day, finally I get hungry and I eat a little something, eat a banana, I can’t remember exactly what I ate.

A day later, Sally Field and Miki are long gone, my place looks like the day after an industry party with those same damned three chicks from Sweden who always make a mess of my life, while the New Zealand and Aussie chicks make a mess of my heart. Whatever rosy glow I had of my future had quickly dissolved into the reality that I was dying a Third World Death in a First World Country. It’s a reality that the unhoused deal with on a daily basis, but it isn’t something to which stylish playboy newspaper reporters find themselves.

I get down to the clinic again, I was sure I would get a real doctor who gives out cures, rather than a wannabe Jainist who hands out 10-day fasts. Then, as now, I am an American, and I need pills. It is our nature as stylish playboy newspaper reporters to respond well to those pills. What was the name of the reporter guy who hung out with Ralph Steadman? I can’t place his name at the moment, the Gonzo guy.

Regardless, we do well with pills.

So I’m sitting in the little office, eager to meet with an actual doctor, and who the fuck comes in the room again? It’s that same quack from before! What the sideways-mounted fuck is this?

He said to me “Mate, dan’t say anotha wahd, I know why yer here Mate.”

“I’m really very sick. I need help doctor.”

“You didn’t do what I told you to do.”

“I did!”

“You didn’t. Because if you did what I told you to do, you wouldn’t be in my office right now.”

“I need medicine.”

“I told you what to do. No food for twinny-fawr hours. You kin have an ice-pop.”

Fucking quack.

I go back home, I didn’t eat any food for at least twelve hours. Then I took a bite of a chocolate chip cookie to stop my stomach from grumbling.

So then I’m back in that same clinic, and that same outback-looking motherfucker comes in the room, calls me a liar to my face, and tells me to go home and not eat for 24 hours. He said I could have ice pops. I didn’t have any ice-pops because I was a stylish playboy newspaper reporter. I bought some ice-pops. It unnerved me that they were so cheap, I think about one Aussie Dollar for the box. None of that frozen fruit shit, these were actual ice-pops, just water, sugar and some flavoring and coloring that gives the consumer the vague recollection of something fruity as they lick the little thing to oblivion whilst debating if they should in fact steal that pogo stick from the Cheeseman Park playground. That kind of ice-pop.

I make it 24 hours, no medicine, no food, the ice-pops sorta distracted me from the hunger, but it wasn’t a big deal, fasts are usually not that difficult once you resign yourself to one. And then maybe 26 hours later, I eat some food, and my American colon in a More-American-Than-America Continent maintains, and I get my strength back.

That’s what happened, the Aussie Doctor was apparently not threatened by medical malpractice lawsuits, and he was able to practice medicine as American doctors wished they could practice medicine, or practice medicine the way the American dentists practice medicine. That Aussie Doctor had a sufficiently well-understood knowledge of the human digestive system that he was able to create a path forward, and then force this fucking idiot of a non-medical person to actually do what the doctor prescribes. American Doctors don’t get to do that anymore. Yes, the pharmaceutical companies made their kind wealthy, but along with the wealth and the majestic public relations campaigns comes the cost of letting a pharma company put its supple latex finger up your arse … What is the old joke? Was it something like the only time you really need to worry during your prostate exam is when you see both of the doctors hands on your shoulders. Just one hand? Eh, you’re probably alright.

I never thought I would wax poetic about getting the eruptions from a little Giardia. But in this new era of Biocolonialism, those days sound wistfully simple in comparison.

editor’s note: If nothing else, the good skatepunks at Space Force 7 are effective implanters of some half-decent brain worms. So now, the Employee-Owners at Space Force 7 bring you this never-before published academic white paper of Rick Yukon, supposedly written during his house arrest on board the U.S.-flagged frigate United Crushing. We never published it because the industry was reportedly not-receptive to disruptive academic product. Now, with the recent release of “I SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM (2021)” by Prince Ea, a sufficient amount of market inertia and the realities of funding for County K-12 schools, that we narrowly agreed to pull this one off the shelf, hoist it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. Again, ( . . . ) signifies something we were unable to transcribe from the handwritten notes.

I recently received the news that the local school district plans to close about 16% of its schools due to recent failed ballot initiative. Though they didn’t explicitly state as such, the schools closed were almost all in academically underperforming sections of the county, in other words, the neighborhood not to poor to get attention from the county, but not wealthy enough to be able to reliably feed kids enough brain food to keep their standardized tests scores high. (Aside from the streamlined grading process, is this why we used standardized tests, so we can academically disenfranchise those students who don’t have a sufficiently long attention span to make it in today’s contemporary economy?)

The County closed a bunch of schools with a lot of kids who live in trailer parks. That’s the best money-saving demographic out there. Nobody likes a trailer park kid, except for another trailer park kid. Even the trailer park owner hates a trailer park kid, which is why the trailer park is sold for housing development, to chase that trailer park boy out of the County boundaries.

The County cut funding to a bunch of schools with kids who live in trailer parks, and nobody will cry because everyone hates a trailer park kid. We are allowed to hate trailer park kids because they come from a place that hangs flags that don’t agree with our enlightened political compass. The trailer park boy of the previous paragraph has been brought to you by the makers of Dead Nuts Money Reality. We appreciate your patronage and hope that you will try our other fine products, like canned Peruvian Cole Slaw and canned Peruvian Ceviche. All of our fine foods are made with highest standards of cleanliness and if you think they taste good, then that’s a bonus, but you at least will know that they won’t kill you, as long as the can isn’t bulging outward. Given the nature of distribution network, we are often forced to deliberately dent cans of our products to be allowed sold in dented can stores. So note, those cans are dented inward and are quite safe for consumption. We hope you will enjoy our family-loved line of canned food products, However, if you experience the extremely unlikely event of finding one of our cans or any other manufacturer’s can that has noticeably swollen outward, then please return that can to your local supermarket and ask for store credit for your choice of any similarly-sized can in the store, even one that costs somewhat more than the one you have with the bulging sides and the rust coming out of the top. Don’t worry, your store doesn’t pay for it, we pay for it! We actually send one of our Dead Nuts Money Representatives to your local store to pick up the offending can, and then we retire the can to our Eisenhower Can of Fame Museum in Pocatello, Idaho where tourists to the lower-east-Pacific North West tourism region visit to see canned food products of yesterday and yesteryear.

Apologies for the slight hijack from our sponsors, you, my love, are forced to abide by my misery of having been fired from the job I loved, of losing the woman with whom I thought would outlive me, and then of being slammed into a makeshift brig in one of the stowage compartments aboard this frigate of MY OWN DESIGN! I have a sufficiently large portal that were I to starve myself for a time somewhat longer than it will take this craft to reach Martinique, that I might be able to squeeze through and risk my life to swim the warm waters which will inevitably arrive as we continue to move South. I might be able to squeeze through that porthole, fall into the warm waters and swim to the nearest island, where I will sufficiently change my looks and identity that I will likely go undetected for the rest of my life, all the more likely since my entire existence will most likely be forgotten less than a month after this ship reaches Martinique.

Unfortunately, the portal is only big enough for me to hang my head and puke, or hang my ass and shit. For pissing, I am unable to construct a sufficiently stable platform to allow a steady stream from the portal, so I piss into a small drain near the centerline bulkhead, and I wash it down with a little peroxide to counteract my natural and enviable alkalinity. It’s just the kind of guy I am, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

My point here is that the County cut funding due to some failed ballot initiative, the County then closed 16% of the underperforming schools, because those ones were fucking up the Federal funding anyway. Even in funding, nobody likes a bunch of trailer park kids.

Unfortunately, trailer park kids are sufficiently intelligent to get jobs as teachers, and given the relatively low-paying position of the job, they tend to remain in affordable housing developments close to the trailer parks. This has created a dilemma for me as a stockholder in the Dead Nuts Money Canned Food Corporation, because our company does need a sufficient number of trailer park kids to manage our docks, and these trailer park teachers have taken an interest in training their trailer park students for jobs in places other than our company’s docks. And by “docks” I don’t mean the kind of unionized places along the waterfront managed by highly-skilled dockworkers, but rather an industrial building behind a road aggregate yard some quarter mile from the interstate.

But I am willing to put that slight conflict of interest aside and move forward with the narrative.

In this case, I responded to the news of this school closing, gleaned from my read-only UseNet connection and I thought to myself, “self, why do we still have schools anyway?”

And thus the solution; we avoid this nonsense by moving onto the next generation of schools, the Dead Nuts Money Academic System.

The DiNMAS, as we call it internally, is an open-source license that grade schools, middle schools, junior high schools, high schools, and senior high schools can use to convert schools that are slated to be closed, into high-efficiency, lower-cost schools for the entire range of students; from advance to on-level and striving. The goal with the program is to exploit this new era of personal computer, from companies like Commodore, Apple, IBM, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Heathkit, Atari and other computer manufacturers who make systems sufficiently affordable to be used by public school administrators, to automate certain time-consuming tasks performed by teachers which tend to cut-into their areas of teaching expertise by forcing these teachers to perform mind-numbing tasks in the administration of their students. These tasks tend to consume a sufficient amount of time in the average school day that teachers are quoted in popular media as claiming that they don’t have enough time to actually teach anymore. And while the cost to program these small computers to handle these tasks will likely be nontrivial in the school’s budget, the cost per teacher will be only a small fraction of what it would cost to pay that teacher to do the same work. This will allow the targeted schools to focus most of their limited funds to what actually helps to create well-adjusted, comfortable, happy and successful students. This includes things like clean hallways, well-functioning water fountains, school lunch and school breakfast programs, well-organized restrooms and locker rooms with plenty of showers, and both a personal locker and a school locker for each student to organize the intricacies of their personal, social and academic lives. We find that this usually comes to about a third of the day to manage their personal needs (i.e. food, hygiene, naps, relaxation, transit, physical activity), and about a third for socialization (i.e. games with peers, teamwork, relaxation, arcade games) and about a third for academic clarification and training. (i.e. schoolwork, explanation by teachers, problem-solving through self/peer/teacher, and testing.)

With this structure, the school can allow a good bit of student-directed autonomy with minimal supervision in about 50% of the school day, and with teachers able to teach their students with either an eight hour day, or overtime if necessary, or as little as a few hours per week. The low-limit of contact hours is necessary to allow for funding of sporadic instruction from parents and members of the community in trades, arts, personal and social skills. For example, a local Teen Alcoholics Anonymous, Toastmasters International, Optimist, Rotary or Elks Club would likely be able to supply the school with a few hours per week on the organization’s dime.

Upon entering the school for the day, the student decides where he or she would like to go first, for instance the cafeteria for some Grape Nuts and milk, or maybe a Pilsbury Toaster Strudel or Space Stick from the small commissary in the hall, if the student wants to get an early jump on their schoolwork and meet with their available teachers before doing the work, rather than after or during as many students prefer. The school day continues, each student does what they need to do to stay healthy and educated, oversight of the students’ progress is provided by the teachers most frequented by the student, be it the classroom, the cafeteria, the sports field, library, science lab, math lab, et al..

The teachers would need to migrate as much as the students in order to foster student progress, communicate with colleagues and create a health and happy balance between work and comfort. Therefore, a chalkboard central to the main entry of the school could inform students where to find their desired teachers, and the teachers could update the system through the day as needed. Some type of computerized “terminal board” system could also be used, similar to what is used in airports and bus depots to direct travelers to their desired flights. Curricula will be sufficiently simplified to ensure that keystone-skills in math, language, science, communication, physical health, personal health, social health, writing and trades are communicated, learned, tested and established for ensuing increase in academic difficulty and ability. Students will be free to seek instruction from peers, teachers, UseNet, online providers such as America Online and Compuserve, and other internet resources. Unlike the current assigned-teacher method, students and teachers are free to target instruction to the most effective for them, which may change day by day for some students and teachers, or remain constant for other students and teachers. While the cost of operating that school would not decrease significantly with the DiNMAS program, the cost to fund significant improvements in student efficacy will be negligible, which can lead to increased Federal and State funding for the school. Finally, a few word about standardized testing … these methods will not show increases in scoring on standardized tests for some students, due to the availability of custom-paced learning within DiNMAS. Therefore, students who do not show an improvement in standardized testing, should also be tested with non-Standardized testing (for instance long-form testing, interview testing or project testing) and then calibrated to the Standardized Scores using standard deviation from standard modal or multi-modal performance on the non-Standardized testing.

The details of the system and open source FORTRAN coding of some academic administration systems are contained within the DiNMAS white paper and available for public inspection, on request to Scientific Illustration Services, who may charge a nominal fee for publication costs.

The end this sales call, I leave you all with the stories of Wrangel Island, a mountainous and isolated arctic island in Russia’s extended territory. On this island, in 1921, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the famed Arctic Terrestrial lecturer from Harvard University, shipped off a small band of explorers to claim the island, even though neither Canada nor Britain wanted the island enough to go to war with Russia over it. So Stefansson did what Arctic Terrestrial lecturers from Harvard University tend to do, and he gathered a small group of well-meaning Yank students to move to the island and raise the British flag. Russia was not pleased. But you see, Stefansson, having come from Icelandic parents, and born in Manitoba himself, moving and living in the Arctic was more a way of life to him, rather than a feat of adventure. In fact, Stefansson, once said something to the effect of “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” His projects were filled with adventure not because he was incompetent, but mostly because a survivor like Stefansson saw nothing too heroic about living, working and prospering in the kind of cold that could Dead Nuts a man’s Money.

It was somewhat engrained in us as kids — probably through some clever and minute editing of some studio executive in the back office somewhere — that Scooby and Shaggy were the heart and soul of The Gang, but that Shaggy’s greatest real-world talent was just being the Yin to the other humans’ Yang. And that’s a reasonable bit of propaganda to promote, the last thing most any parent wanted from 1970 up to 2020 is for their kid to get a whiff of the truth and then shitcan his or her plans to join the Air Force, or the Corporate Force or the Government Force, and then take up doing what Shaggy and an imaginary dog did best.

An edit here or there, subtle-like, and next thing the varying viewing public knows, Shaggy is reduced to a weed-stoned food-whore.

It was a necessary change for the show to stay on the air if bothered to think about it. A bunch of potheads can still be relied upon to hunt for the ghosts, to install the drywall, to negotiate the contract with other potheads, to operate the machinery of the economy as intended. But that other little truth about Shaggy, it was the inconvenient truth.

Not that Shaggys of the world were destined for the Diplomatic Corp either, that still worked, peace is still the last resort industry when the Air Force, the Corporate Force and the Government Force can wring that last dime out of a collection of broken people. The Diplomatic Corp is still a reasonably profitable and forgotten child of The Triad, and truth be told, half of the Secretariat is jammed with a bunch of weed-stoned food-whores, you can see them lining up at the Delegates Dining Room, smuggling food home wrapped in napkins for their children back at the townhouse, not necessarily because those kids are all that hungry, but because the delegate gets to relive the moment of delight of getting a bit of food unwrapped from a napkin-wrapped delight, smuggled out of the party, as if they were children once again.

Shaggy could only be counter-cultural to the degree that the entire show could remain on the air, and that meant training all future The Gangs for their intended jobs; Egghead, Wife, Employee and Child … oh, and Weed-Stoned Food-Whore, that job too, for the kids weren’t smart enough to become an Egghead, pretty enough to become a Wife, lovable enough to become a Child, or cravatted enough to become a half-decent Employee.

Shaggy’s existence on that show had to hide the truth that most of the writers seemed to grok by the time they were allowed to air an episode, from 1970 up through the years of Scrappy Doo, Scooby Dum, Dixie Doo, and Yankee Doodle Doo … Shaggy could ride. And not just ride, Shaggy could rip. Scooby could ride too, but other than a few pugs in China, nobody worries much about a bunch of dogs riding boards.

But by the time the Gen-Xers were old enough to carve asphalt, surf, snow or air, the truth of the 1970 detente was plain enough; a massive number of children got the message anyway, and they couldn’t be effectively controlled by puzzles, sex, money or drugs. They either needed puzzles and sex and money and drugs. Given the shortage of any of these ingredients, they needed to ride so they could ignore at least three of these. Was it an animated Shaggy who inserted that little brain-rinse into those impressionable minds? Or was Shaggy just the representative of what happened when they finally hooked into their first wave, their first carve, or their first frontside axle stall?

It never helps to blame the pusher for the addict’s habits, but the pusher is the pusher, and Shaggy and Scooby managed to push that drug in more than a few episodes and through the decades; an uncatchable villain could be reliably caught with a sufficiently skilled board rider. It sowed the seeds, at least, for us to nail an old skate to a board, or score an actual skateboard or a surfboard and hide the thing from our parents.

There is inevitably division within the tribe. The ocean surfer sniffs at the river surfer that what he does is not really surfing at all. But landlocked with a few raging creeks, and the river surfer will find a way to ride that river wave that presents every bit of difficulty of balancing the breaking wave at Big Sur, maybe even more, with the rocks and the unstoppable thermodynamics of ninety cubic feet per second, that forces the river surfer to ride to the point of hypothermic collapse, then get out, drink hot tea from the thermos to warm the core up from the observed 95-degrees F, shiver uncontrollably in a hoody for a bit, and then surf the blessed hydraulic when the flesh is again willing.

For some reason, surf is always King. Yes, it’s difficult, but so is a Varial Heelflip, so is a downhill carve in traffic off a mountain. Yes, it’s meditational, but even the best breaking wave rides for not much more than a minute, while the river surfers ride endlessly, until their muscles stiffen with the hypothermia and can no longer reliably hold the board … the kind of meditational Zen achieved on a twenty-minute hydraulic carve with body rapidly disconnecting itself from the brain due to second-stage hypothermia is meditational too. Surf is King in large part because of the elite difficulty of catching a wave; one must have access to a half-decent board, one must have access to the ocean, one must have access to a community who is willing to let a grommet snake a wave. Compared to that, any other board sport is common and egalitarian; there are plenty of skateparks, and the nature of riding a board on concrete tends to scare away most of the old folks after they break their first knee or elbow. There are stretches of tasty asphalt over which the intrepid Snake Pilot can carve his or her Snakeboard into the glassy abyss. There are mountains of groomed snow, and even more ungroomed powder for the Pow Surfers, while the frigid air chases away most of whom rely on motorized chair lifts. Add a wing or a kite, and the wingshredders decouple from the planet itself, tough to find a carve with a lower barrier of entry.

Rick Yukon found an early addiction to the joys of moving quickly over concrete via the magic of urethane. And then he gradually added to his quiver the other forms of riding. Shaggy and Scooby were there in his mind, somewhere, urging the simpleton to move faster, move more dangerously, carve narrower, less surely, approach the Divine from the backside, and then romance the biggest stone of them all.

When the societal rejects discover The Ride, as Shaggy surely urged them to do, they discover that they only need to step off the treadmill to see the sunlight and the night. And that has always devalued the Global Client State Machine in at least a theoretical, if unmeasurable way.

We’ll miss ya, John Hartman, it’s been a helluva ride. And it’s never been without love, baby.