sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it
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new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?
me: dONn’t touch those
new guy:
me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.
new guy:
new guy:
me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.
“Bill Daniel of Nashville, Tennessee, who had been an Army recruiter in 1967. When he was interviewed 35 years later, he was still bitter about the approximately 100 “McNamara’s Morons” he had personally recruited in the slums of Cleveland, Ohio, during the war. “It didn’t really sit too good with me,” he said. “But when you are told what to do in the military, you do what you are told to do. They never should have been in the military…” Many of the low-aptitude men that he and his fellow recruiters signed up were either killed in combat or, when they left the Army, they departed with less-than-honorable discharges for such offenses as going AWOL, insubordination, and enuresis (bed-wetting). “You take a man who can’t read or write,” he said. “He never knew about deferments. He comes from the ghetto and he may not want to take orders, then you send him by the most expedient means necessary into combat. That’s only going to lead to failure.” In 2002, at the age of 71, he told a Nashville newspaper reporter that he had been devoting his life after the Army to petitioning the military to overturn the [less than honorable] discharges of McNamara’s Morons. At that time, he had been successful in about 400 appeals.”
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory (via uss-edsall)
“Harris returned to the Spec 5’ s office, and “he had tears running down his face.” Apparently the Army wanted to take back his combat pay because there were no orders in his file assigning him to Vietnam. “The Army had enlisted him, when he never should have been enlisted [because of an IQ score of 71] … They’d sent him to Vietnam and gotten him blown up, leaving him crippled for life. They returned him to active duty when they should have given him an honorable discharge due to combat-related injuries and sent him home with a 100% disability check every month. Through all that, he’d managed to keep smiling. The Army telling him he wasn’t supposed to have been there to begin with, it was his own fault he got blown up and he wasn’t entitled to his lousy $ 130 in combat pay per month finally broke him.” Saying that “it takes a lot to leave me speechless,” the Spec 5 wrote, “Did I happen to mention that Harris was black? [But] it wasn’t really a matter of racial injustice, it was matter of Outright Injustice.” The Spec 5 decided to take on the bureaucracy. He made many phone calls to try to persuade his superiors to intervene, and in the end, he triumphed. “Harris got to go home a couple months ahead of schedule. He kept his combat pay and Purple Heart, his discharge was a medical discharge due to combat-sustained injuries. … He was also given 100% disability … Not much to give a person in exchange for being crippled for life at nineteen years old.””
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory (via uss-edsall)
“According to Chief Warrant Officer 4 William S. Tuttle, a Vietnam veteran, “If you take someone with an IQ of 40 and give him a rifle, he’s more dangerous to you than he is to the enemy. I almost got shot twice and had one guy almost nail me with a LA W [light anti-armor weapon] when he was startled by a sudden noise. If you put [a low-IQ man] in an infantry patrol, you have to spend most of your time making sure he doesn’t kill a friendly [a comrade] by accident, and doesn’t get himself killed during contact because he’s totally unaware of what’s going on around him. Imagine sending a five-year-old into combat. That’s what Project 100,000 was all about.””
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory (via uss-edsall)
“Most of the 354,000 men of Project 100,000 went to Vietnam, with about half of them assigned to combat units. A total of 5,478 of these men died while in the service, most of them in combat. Their fatality rate was three times that of other GIs.”
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory (via uss-edsall)
“Aside from lack of funds, there was one big reason why many men failed to be trained in special skills. While standards were lowered to permit them to enter the military, standards were not lowered for entry into the hundreds of professional occupations the military offered. Most of the men could not qualify for fields like electronics and bridge building. Herb DeBose, who served as a first lieutenant in Vietnam, said that many of the Project 100,000 men under his command “did not belong there…. The Army was supposed to teach them a trade in something—only they didn’t. I had people who could do things only by rote. I found out they could not read. No skills before, no skills after.””
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory
(via uss-edsall)
“Recruiters had great success with recruiting for Project 100,000. As the war progressed, military recruitment of low-scoring men in poor urban neighborhoods “rose to an art form,” says Myra MacPherson, a former Washington Post reporter and author of Long Time Passing, a major study of soldiers who served in Vietnam. As an example, she says that “black Marine Corps recruiters visited shabby slums where mothers were often fair game. Recruiters told them that if their sons were drafted, nine times out of ten they wouldn’t get the job they wanted. But if their sons enlisted in the Marines, they would get ‘valuable training.’” Of course, the recruiters knew (but didn’t say) that many of the young men, with their low AFQT scores, were unlikely to qualify for any training other than combat arms. They certainly could not qualify for the glamorous assignments—such as U.S. embassy guard in foreign countries—that were illustrated in the glossy brochures that recruiters gave to the mothers. One of the brochures said, “Paris is only one of the many overseas Marine Corps posts or installations where you could be stationed.” The recruiting campaigns were very successful, says MacPherson. The large number of Project 100,000 volunteers from poverty areas in many cities “compensated for the decline in volunteers from more affluent neighborhoods.” What if a young man could not read or write? Not to worry. Some Army and Marine recruiters used “ringers” (substitutes) to take the AFQT for candidates who could not pass the test on their own. Donald Robinette, a Marine recruiter, told a Congressional panel that ringers were used at the induction center in Cleveland, Ohio. He said that one of the ringers, who took the test for 15 different candidates, was so skilled that if you told him you needed a particular score—31, say—he would deliver the exact score.”
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory (via uss-edsall)
“Sergeant James Ferguson recalled that soon after arriving in Vietnam, his air cavalry squadron was flown out of home base in helicopters to search a small Vietnamese village. “We searched the village and set up later in a perimeter to wait for the extraction choppers. As we waited for the extraction, Private Sam Judd [not his real name] fell asleep and no one on his assigned ship or our ground control realized that he didn’t get on the chopper. When we got back to home base, his platoon realized he was missing and we were sent back out to locate him. We went back to the pickup point and started searching back to the village. Judd was in the center of the village sitting with the mama-sans [older Vietnamese women] drinking Coke, his favorite beverage. He was sitting there like a little kid with no worries on his mind. He just laughed about being left behind because he fell asleep. To understand how Private Judd could have been left behind with all the chopper noise and everyone moving around him, you must have a little more information. Judd had a low IQ and really had no understanding of the Army, war or really about life in general. In my opinion he had been sent through Basic and AIT by a bunch of people who just wanted to pass him on to someone else to straighten him out. They had no time for the paperwork that would be required to get him a Section 8 [a discharge for being mentally unfit]. I see Judd every time I watch Full Metal Jacket, but not as someone dangerous, just some child who has no idea what is happening around him. Everyone in our outfit tried to look out for him, but this one time we all fell short. A few days after that, he was just gone from the unit with no explanations.” Ferguson was never able to find out what happened to Judd.”
— McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War, by Hamilton Gregory
(via uss-edsall)
“I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now as so rare that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from “White Nights”
“Я мечтатель; у меня так мало действительной жизни, что я такие минуты, как эту, как теперь, считаю так редко, что не могу не повторять этих минут в мечтаньях. Я промечтаю об вас целую ночь, целую неделю, весь год.”
