Apparently both when I was in school. 
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I don’t want no Jackson Pollock paintjobs!
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Ahhhh the Needle Gun Quartet in C Minor. Classics brought to you courtesy of the Deck Dept.
Now available in iTunes and Spotify
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Oh good! Now I can put that in my sleepy serenity play list…………….
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Klaveness understands the underlying threat. The inevitability of painting over murals on a TS is not the issue, the underlying issue is the tyranny of the thought police long predicted by George Orwell and others. The ideological genesis brought into practice was given birth in the 1917 revolution and has morphed and adapted itself in the cloak of a softer nuanced control of speech, art and thought for the “collective good”. Those on the left wan to quickly write of such pronouncements as conspiratorial utterances, they are not. I do not have a dog in the fight, am a hawsepiper and onboard ship am fastidious in not discussing political, cultural or social issues with the crew or fellow officers except a in select cases. KP Chief hopefully as a “thought leader” (a beltway expression which in itself is problematic and chilling) does not conduct PC sessions onboard ship to bring about “correct” political thought. As a former Port State Control officer in the CG, I remember boarding the former Communist east European ships painted with Stalinist-like propaganda murals in the passageways and large crew lounge where the political officer formerly conducted weekly indoctrination lessons to the hapless crew. Hopefully as department head and part of the onboard management team, he and other senior officers do not abuse their positions to influence their subordinates with their political/ ideological views. A ship is a sardine can environment with as KP Chief pointed out is highly diverse, but that diversity does not give any one corner the right to extinguish tradition, heritage and the past because they have been persuaded to find it offensive. Frankly I find that more than a little offensive, it is actually a genocide of history and heritage. Lenin said, control the language, you control the culture. Control the culture you control the nation.
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Latest word from CMA T/S Golden Bear is that they are surrounded by men with paint guns and cut-off from all support. The crew is in desperate need of supplies, art supplies that is.
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Seige of the TS Bob Ross.
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Only if there’s happy little Tahitian girls 
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Sure, there’s the pragmatic angle, the question of how best to prepare today’s students for the world of tomorrow.
Then there’s the question of what the hell is going on in a wider context. I don’t have any skin in the game, because in my glorious old homeland, saying anything demeaning to a member of a protected group will already net you three years in prison.
You can poke all the fun you want, but where the winds of change are taking us is both relevant and troubling:
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Normalization of deviance is the only explaination I can think of as to how a maritime school could get here.
If someone was to ask what about having the students do so-called “wall paintings” and admin will set up a judging committee to screen out the ones considered in bad taste and so forth the reaction would be “are you joking right now?”.
It must have little by little, “a shame to paint over those” and next thing you know the command of the Golden Bear and the admin of CMA look foolish.
As a guideline In the future the command should ask "is this how to run a tight ship? If the answer is no, don’t do it.
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You’re making perfect sense. A letter stating that there will be no more decorative painting of the bulkheads would have been totally non-controversial.
Isn’t that pretty much exactly what they’re saying, though? The letter from the president is pretty vague, but…
I am going to insist, and ensure, that whatever expressions of art that are sanctioned by the academy , such as these murals, reflect the level of professionalism that is expected by our profession.
…sounds an awful lot like they are happy to allow continued wall painting, so long as the sketches are considered in good taste. If anything, that brings them closer to art school territory, IMHO.
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Yes, that’s what I’m saying, how in the hell did they get there?
Now they have to tack away from a lee shore, never should have got there to begin with. Poor voyage planning. Evidently they forgot they are a maritime school.
I suspect that most of academies are overrun with politically correct liberal arts faculty with PhDs and the type management by faculty committee and state education bureaucracy that is typical at any state college.
Under Wendi Carpenter a few on the SUNY campus openly stated that the opinions of the licensed deck and engineering instructors on anything academic or even training ship related was moot because they did not possess PhDs.
The head librarian back then was one of those who felt that her input took precedence over that of the Captains because of her doctorate in library science.
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That or you’ve got the asinine College Station “Drill and Ceremony Corps” attitude that seems to have taken over at Texas Maritime Academy now. In my opinion, they’re both equally bad.
This has nothing to do with any of us who did not attend this particular maritime college, but it is difficult not to have a view, particularly since the topic has enlivened a dying forum. In my own case it brings back the memory of a small pasenger ship in which I had served, which had travelled from the Far East back to London (imagine that – there were passengers) and we, the two apprentices, held a party on the last evening of the voyage for virtually all the paseengers under twenty, in our small cabin. Towards the end of the evening we got out our permanent markers, a new product, and everyone wrote messages on the bulkheads. Did it matter, the ship was going to the breakers? But in the morning the Mate made us scrub off all the offending graffiti before he allowed us to pay off. So for the captain of the Golden Bear, had he known of this event, there was probably a message.
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I wouldn’t think very many of the new crop of cadets coming aboard would have any interest at looking at the “wall painting” of the crew long gone. Assuming they came to learn seamanship that is. Nobody is doing them any favors leaving the old stuff up.
The fight against the PC police is a distraction.
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