The Rain it Raineth on the Just*

10. July 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Ain't That America?

So, as readers may have gathered from the screaming headlines in the Establishment Media Organs, we in Central Texas had a spot of rain this last weekend. What wasn’t in the mainstream news was the fact that we have had local warnings and alerts of rain and thunderstorms and the like, about every other day for the last two or three weeks, and most of those warnings amounted to just a piddling few drops – with one exception, about two weeks ago. My backyard rain gauge registered 6 and a half inches in the space of an hour and a half around 3 in the morning on that day. Such weather antics have kept my garden lush and green into midsummer, and the lawns of those of my neighbors who have them, similarly lush. Some of our summers are like that, alternated with summers that go three digit-temperatures without a drop of rain in sight for three months in a row.

The early-morning storm which dropped half a foot of precipitation on our suburb two weeks ago also fueled a flashflood on Salado Creek at 5 AM, which punched across the stretch of a major highway access road and carried away 15 automobiles driven by early commuters on their way to work, leaving the bodies of 11 drivers scattered for a mile and a half farther downstream. Kind of embarrassing, to know that one can readily drown in the heart of a major city, but that is Texas for you, and not the first time this has happened, either. San Antonio is threaded by several good-sized creeks and one river, which on the odd occasion become catastrophically more than good-sized. The generous availability of clear, sweet springs, creeks and rivers was the reason that the city and a string of colonial missions was founded here by the Spanish in the first place anyway.

On a Friday night in October 1998, a massive storm system dumped rain on the Hill Country. The weather authorities were never certain of exactly how much rain fell, as all the available official rain gauges topped out at 24 inches. Not much fell on the city itself that night – in fact, I had set the sprinklers to run in my garden, on seeing that the chances of rain that day were rated at about 40%; hardly any chance at all. But all that following morning and through midday, the rain that had fallen in the Hill Country north of San Antonio came roaring down from the hills and inundated the city; Leon Creek, Salado Creek, the San Antonio River itself. I happened to be working at the local public radio station that Saturday – it was the weekend of the pledge drive. All that day, the lists of closed streets and flooded intersections and neighborhoods kept mounting up. And up. And up, until I wondered if I would be able to get home at all, since it seemed that half the city was flooded. The lower stretch of IH-35 through downtown was filled with water, the parkland above the Olmos Dam (which along with some interesting engineering schemes prevents downtown San Antonio from flooding out entirely) filled up, and only heroic efforts by volunteers rescued horses from a stable on Salado Creek near where the old Austin Highway crosses over it. Since that year, much of the real estate on the banks of the Salado have been converted to a park and greenway, with paved paths for joggers and bicyclists, but the dangers of flash floods within city limits endure – just as it does in the Hill Country.

Just ten years ago, over Memorial Day weekend, a similar heavy rainfall poured into the Blanco River, on the eastern edge of the Hill Country, and devastated the town of Wimberley. Again at night, again over a holiday weekend, catching local residents and visitors by surprise. Two families vacationing in a house by the river were lost when the rising river carried the house away entirely and smashed it into a bridge; one family were close relatives of a good neighbor of ours. Only the father of one family and the family dog survived when the house was smashed apart upon hitting a bridge. Two bodies were never found; my neighbor is still heartbroken over this, and as one might imagine, this last weekend brought it all back. He reminded me when we spoke yesterday, of how the Hill Country is also known as flash flood alley; the soil is thin and clay-like, and the river may be just a gentle trickle ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

This last weekend was the one hundredth time, it would seem. I had written an episode in one of the Luna City chronicles, based on the Wimberley flash flood but giving it a happier ending. In the brief info-dump essay preceding that adventure, I wrote: The river, which for years might have been a gentlemanly placid and waist-deep trickle between steep banks, meandering over a wide stretch of polished gravel, water-scoured bedrock, and small thickets of rushes … will drink deep of a sudden heavy rainfall, and go mad.

*And on the unjust fella
But mostly on the just, because
The Unjust steals the Just’s umbrella!

Barbarity For You

30. June 2025 · Comments Off on Barbarity For You · Categories: Fun With Islam, Good God, My Head Hurts

Of all the malignant concepts spawned and promulgated through our so-called higher education institutions – things such as loathsome Corbusier-style concrete box architecture, modern so-called art which depends more on the manifesto accompanying the paint splatter or pile of trash, the managerial transferability of MBA-degree holders between any industry at all – I believe the worst and most damaging of all is the concept of oppressor/oppressed. In every dyad, one party is the oppressor and deserving of every action inflicted on them, and the other is the oppressed, who is totally justified in any action lashing back against the oppressor.

Nothing else matters; decency, a sense of fairness, any consideration of the actual and specific facts of the matter, the inarguable reality of the situation, even the rules of warfare as generally designated by the Geneva Convention. All those considerations fly out the window, when it’s a matter of the designated oppressed getting the drop on the perceived oppressor. The designated oppressor or any single representative of the oppressing class gets deserved vengeance visited on them by any member of the designated oppressed. The rights and wrongs of the specific situation have nothing to do with it. The comparative wealth or connection to privilege, social standing – these disparities are insignificant, once the parties are sorted into oppressed or oppressor. It may be that wealth, privilege and high social position is held by the party designated as oppressed, and the party of the so-called oppressor is poor, unconnected and working-class. That doesn’t matter; nothing else matters in this construction. The oppressor is always in the wrong, the oppressed is always justified in whatever action they have taken.

Any complaint from an aggrieved victim is dismissed with a contemptuous response of “You deserved it, you despicable, deplorable bullying member of the designated oppressor class; maybe you aren’t personally responsible for perpetuating the oppression, but the people like you are!”

It makes it all simple, when it comes down to deciding the rights and wrongs between individuals and groups. No confusion, no distraction with inconvenient facts, or horrific, brutal deeds. It’s the moral morons’ way out of having to make difficult decisions about right and wrong, given actions by an individual against another, or of one group against another. Just figure out who is the oppressed, or the representative thereof, and who is the oppressor (or representative) and hey, presto – problem sorted. White people bad, black or brown always good, Israelis always bad because they are white (not really, but that’s what the moral morons insist), Palestinians are poor hapless, helpless brown victims justified in committing any savagery, economic migrants and benefits scroungers from Africa are always and forever innocent, it’s just too bad if ethnically white English girls have been gang-raped and sex-trafficked for decades by Pakistani men, and black American hood rats can shoot, rob and burn their way across the urban American landscape, but Trump voters are guilty and never a chance of proven innocent.

I’d uncork a few more words about the disgusting display of raw Jew-hate displayed by performers and the audience at the Glastonbury music festival – broadcast live by the Muslim-lovers at the BBC, but I think Melanie Phillips said it best in describing it as Nuremburg at Glastonbury.
Comment as you wish.

The Novel Way

26. June 2025 · Comments Off on The Novel Way · Categories: Ain't That America?, General Nonsense, History, That's Entertainment!

This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.

Anyway, the epistolary novel isn’t much done these days; the last mega-huge bestseller in that form that I remember reading of my own free will was 1965’s Up The Down Staircase – a chaotic year in the life of an idealistic young schoolteacher on her first year in an interestingly dysfunctional urban school. Dysfunction then meant smoking cigarettes out behind the trash cans and dropping cherry bombs in the boys’ lavatory toilets, which seems rather charmingly retro, in comparison to present-day open riot in the hallways and violent assault in the classroom. Staircase was also made into a movie starring Sandy Dennis.

But the epistolary form was once overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 18th century. What has been accepted as the first-ever novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or Virtue Rewarded established the form. That novel began as a series of template letters, newly-literate, newly-well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, for the use of, only Richardson wished to incorporate moral lessons in the template letters and so created a narrative and characters to hang the letters upon. Pamela turned out to be so wildly popular on that merit that Richardson followed it with another such, even longer and more operatic: Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady. This featured a young woman of imperishable virtue and her moral victory over a scheming vile seducer, who was not above kidnapping, drugging and rape of the heroine. This was also made into a miniseries in 1991, with Sean Bean as the vile seducer. He dies in the end, as is his customary habit in most (not all) movies and miniseries episodes in which he appears.

There are advantages to telling a story thusly; it is outright fun for a writer to basically create a character monolog and put on another voice and style, for however long or short – and sometimes very short. I’ve done a partial-epistolary in My Dear Cousin, and incorporated letters from characters in some of my other books. (Truckee, The Adelsverein Trilogy, That Fateful Lightning.) It’s also an excellent means of incorporating a necessary info-dump or inserting a shorter account of what would be a tediously lengthy scene or account of a necessary sequence if done in full narration. There is scope for a modern version, with emails, memos-for-record, messages and blog posts, so the format is not exhausted by any means.

There are some disadvantages to writing a completely epistolary novel; it is all a sequence of monologues, and with a good writer, the character voice of every letter-writing character ought to be distinctive, differentiated from each other on the page. Given that not many scribblers of letters are given to write like a reporter, descriptions and conversations are … often sketchy, and more implied than actually included verbatim. I suspect that totally epistolary novels must be carefully planned and plotted in advance so as to be certain of including every necessary detail. The other disadvantage shows up more clearly in novels like Richardson’s Clarissa, wherein a five-minute long incident or conversation becomes the basis for a pages-long letter describing it in exhaustive detail. A brief sliver of action is measured off in yards, and yards and yards of verbiage which would have taken hours to write, giving one to wonder if these characters really did anything without a ream of paper in one hand, and an inkpot and pen in the other to memorialize the moment, rather like 18th century verbal selfie.
Discuss as you will – what other interesting epistolary or semi-epistolary novels are out there today?

The Long Awaited Fix

20. June 2025 · Comments Off on The Long Awaited Fix · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam

At long last, like a decades-long grumbling appendix, the radical Islamic mullahcracy which has ruled and ruined Iran for slightly longer than my daughter has been alive, is being suitably and righteously dealt with.

By the Israeli’s, and not the US, but I’ll take what satisfaction I can get and be grateful. Business is being settled at long last and after more than 40 years. The running sore of the middle east, the funder, inspiration and director for so much terrorism against the non-Islamic world is being debrided and sanitized. I honestly wonder why that has taken so long, knowing full well of the specific animus that the mullahs of Iran had against both Israel and the US. I guess that we all had other fish to fry, metaphorically speaking, over the last four decades; settling the hash of the ayatollahs just wasn’t at the top of our ‘to-do’ list. As a member of the military and most often stationed overseas, I had plenty of reason for Iran-sponsored/funded terrorism to be on my mind, after the violent takeover of the us embassy in Teheran, and the holding hostage of embassy staff, as well as Americans who just happened to be in the wrong place on that day.

Invading a country’s embassy is on the same level as invading the country itself, and technically, we would have been well within our rights if we declared war right then and there. But of course, Jimmy Carter – on whose thick, sanctimonious, Jew-hating head responsibility for the hostage debacle landed – hemmed and hawed, whimped and simped his way through the remainder of his term as president. It has since been considered likely that Carter bears a large portion of the blame for the shah’s overthrow.

Some time ago, there was a discussion on the blogger Diplomad’s place, where a number of long-time Department of State veterans were reminiscing on this topic. One who had been around in the late 1970s recollected that the sudden official animus against the shah’s works and all his ways came up out of nowhere. This was much to the commenter’s surprise, and when he asked ‘why’ was told that it came from the very top. The general consensus among State Department veterans on that particular thread was that Carter pulled the rug out from under the shah at the bidding of Saudi Arabia; Carter’s good buddies with a vested interest in hamstringing a regional rival, especially a relatively tolerant and secular one. (Personal note – I was doing basic training at Lackland AFB during the time when the Air Force was also training Saudi and Iranian personnel, and I carried on a brief and very chaste flirtation with an Iranian tech school student. He was sweet and gentlemanly and poetical, and told me several times that the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as being ignorant and uncouth country bumpkins. Hardly civilized at all, compared to proud and worldly Persians. Having had a couple of less than pleasant encounters with the Saudi students, my fellow female trainees and I agreed.)

The supposition of the Diplomad’s fellow diplomatic veterans seemed pretty logical and I have the impression that “Blame Carter!” has percolated around the conservative side of the blogosphere for a while. If we had a national news media worthy of any respect, or even just academic historians of contemporary international relations who are not ashamed to cast shade on a prominent Democrat Party figure, they might have investigated the possibility and brought the hard evidence out then or since.

Oh, perhaps all the woes of the Middle East since the overthrow of the Shah can’t be blamed on Carter’s fat and sanctimonious head. Native progressives and communists did their part, as did the religious autocrats themselves, each party thinking to use the other towards their own ends. It just turned out that the Islam-addled mullahs were more organized, and had a wide, if not particularly deep pool of popularity among the rural elements. Or so I had read at the time. One does read reports lately that the Iranian mullahcracy has become increasingly corrupt, incompetent and resoundingly hated; that Iranian women are unhappy and protesting having to live under the restrictions of an Islamic version of The Handmaid’s Tale, that Iranians generally are rebelling against Islam various social cruelties and reverting to pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism, or even Christianity. I watched a recent video purporting to be of a currently popular outdoor sport in Iran – that of running up behind Islamic clerics and knocking off their turbans. The overthrow of the mullahcracy has been confidently predicted with increasing frequency – but has never managed to happen. With the surgical amputation of the whip hand by Israel (and perhaps quiet assistance from us) though – chances are better for an Iranian revolt against the power of the mullahs.

The main thing to keep in mind now, is that when the bombs and missiles stop falling and the drones return to their base, Iran’s future will – rightfully – be in the hands of the Iranians; both those in-country and those of the Iranian exile diaspora. Their problems are theirs to fix. Comment as you wish.

The Smile on the Face of the Tiger

13. June 2025 · Comments Off on The Smile on the Face of the Tiger · Categories: Ain't That America?, Allied Treachery, European Disunion

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” – Winston Churchill

I was reminded this week also of the limerick about the lady smiling as she rides the tiger – and how they return from the ride with the tiger smiling and the lady inside. I wonder this week if certain politicians (American and European mostly) and good many of our own very dear national media figures are riding the tigers with a desperate smile plastered on their faces. They’ve had a good time and have scored richly remunerative leadership positions or climbed to the top of the national media heap in advocating for various progressive causes, or in defending such causes through various media organs.

They’ve been riding those metaphorical tigers for decades; championing everything from enabling the mass importation of illegal immigrants and spurious refugees country-shopping for the most generous set of benefits, gay porn for kindergarteners, skimping on fire prevention and brush clearance in the name of the ecology (looking at you, Governor ‘Brylcreem’ Newsome), enabling and indulging the deranged and drug-abusing homeless, knee-capping the domestic industrial base and reliable energy-producing technologies, enthusiastically denigrating the white ethnic working class (and majority) citizens to favor the exotic ‘other’ in every possible way, leading many observers to suspect that our leadership wishes to dissolve the people, and replace them with a much more biddable and subservient population. Oh, and don’t forget how our educational overlords have reduced the value of a college education into something with the approximate value of a used bus ticket, and graduated high schoolers who can barely read a third-grade textbook.

The big names in our national media rode the tiger by insisting for years that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, an incorruptible and stone-patriot American, against everything that the rest of us could see with our own eyes. For which we were told that our lying eyes were deceiving us, right up until a few weeks ago, when those big national names began sobbing about how it wasn’t their fault! They were all deliberately fooled by certain of the Biden administration top staffers. So – this belated cri de Coeur establishes the national media as either partisan hacks or too dumb and incurious to even call themselves reporters of news at anything more elevated than a high school newspaper. If this is the national media’s tiger dismount, it’s way too late to redeem the lost credibility.

As for progressive politicians, academicians and bureaucrats generally, the policies on which they have built decades-worth of careers are turning out to be wildly unpopular, especially among citizens who feel themselves to have been grossly harmed by them, and voted last November to favor our own interests and concerns. Trump and other MAGA-sympathetic office-holders have the whip-hand in the US, at least for now – and not wasting any time in holding back with the whip. Now comes the time when the ride is getting … uncomfortable for those on the tiger. Ask not for whom the mob bays – it bays for thee. And when and if they decided to dismount, the smile will be on the face of the tiger.

Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cow

05. June 2025 · Comments Off on Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cow · Categories: Ain't That America?

Wee Jamie, the wonder grandson, has a whole room full of toys – and most of them have not been purchased by an indulgent grandparent, but rather his mother, who revels in thrift stores and invariably emerges from the premises, triumphantly bearing a rather choice item that she got for a relative pittance. Such as the collections of originally high-end Coach or Dooney & Burke handbags which she bought here and there for $5-25 dollars which are valued on EBay for about four times that, or more. Seriously, I think the guy at the local luggage, shoe and handbag repair place wants to follow her into one of these emporiums, just to get a handle on how she manages to spot the good stuff. This is the woman who picked up a pair of earrings out of the 1$ bin of costume jewelry at a booth at the Blanco monthly market and had them turn out to be real emeralds and 18 carat gold.

Anyway, she buys Fisher-Price Little People sets for Wee Jamie, and the one which he currently loves the most – or which he plays with the most often – is the jungle adventure set. There are a number of buttons on it, which elicit a chirpy voice telling the kids about how neato wild animals are, and suggesting short, happy, and helpful encounters with the jungle critters: one suggests that a hippo will helpfully carry you across the river, and the  other that a chimpanzee will share bananas with you if you are hungry. Talk about fantasies … in real-no-kidding jungle wilderness, hippos are horribly dangerous (being large, nearsighted and hostile) and chimpanzees are vicious and murderous primates several times stronger than the average male of our species.

And in fact, bears are not cuddly, friendly creatures either, so WHY do we give children stuffed bears to play with and give them the notion that a thousand-pound brown bear is Christopher Robin’s silly friend Pooh? I know – fantasy, and story-telling, which is all very nice in it’s place, but it would be nice if at some point we got more realistic about wildlife to our offspring generally. Look, it’s not just Australia where all the wildlife is planning to kill humans. The larger mammals in the rest of the world are, especially the big carnivorous ones with lots of claws and sharp teeth. We are tasty and made of meat, and even the larger herbivores can be hazardous to humans, as every park ranger working our popular wilderness parks can attest. The rank stupidity of park visitors who have to be warned against trying to pet the buffalo or park their children close to the wandering bear to get that perfect photo shot has not been exaggerated. There is a reason such people are dubbed “tourons.”

Thus endeth the lessen for today. I wonder if the jungle adventure Little People toy can be reprogrammed to say something like “The hippo is huge, stupid and dangerous – build yourself a canoe” and “The chimpanzee will not share – he’s rip your face off, so pick your own banana.”

When the Lights Go Out

30. May 2025 · Comments Off on When the Lights Go Out · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf

I see by the news headlines that there were sudden, massive but mercifully brief power outages in Southern France this last week. Accident or deliberate sabotage; of course there is a radical group claiming responsibility. Doing the work that the Green-worshiping governing bodies won’t do, or at least can’t be caught openly doing, yet. All to protect the Erf, although I suspect that the Erf can very readily protect itself in the long run, as long as careless bureaucrats, cost-cutting industries and so-called “green” technologies aren’t pouring poisonous substances out onto it in wholesale lots. I recall reading some years ago an energy-consumption proposal by an especially Erf-maddened theoretician, apparently a man of a particularly savagely Spartan bent who outlined a plan of his own devising: that only one in a hundred households could enjoy a then-current early 21st century lifestyle, with electric-powered appliances, lights, computers, HVAC and all. The other 99 households would be permitted a single low-watt light bulb and nothing else. The way that I read it at the time, this particular theorist was utterly serious about replicating a two-tier society of privilege; a few nobles living in comfort, and everyone else in conditions of medieval squalor, by woodfire and candlelight. I seriously wonder if this Erf theoretician was any relation to Al Gore and the other save-the-Erf-by-grinding-down-everyone-else World Economic Forum coterie; a life in the lap of luxury and convenience, while everyone else is grubs for a miserable, serf-like existence.

It’s all about “renewables” when it comes to energy, as the Green Erf-worshippers insist. Wind and solar, even if such currently-available technologies have demonstrated being a sometime thing of late, especially in the northern hemispheres. The recent country-wide power outage in Spain and Portugal – just as the massive power outages in Texas during Snowmagedden 2021 are a harbinger, a hint of disasters to come if governments, like Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain and the rest of the renewable-deluded protect-the-Erf insist on following through with renewables on a national scale. Because the one element that a modern industrial nation depends on is readily available power. Early on, our nation’s embryo manufacturing base (as well as others) depended on hydro power, followed by coal and oil-powered steam, then nuclear as soon as technological advances made it possible. The manufacturing capacity of the western world made it possible for those nations to rule the world, or at least, those parts of it which mattered to them. More importantly to those who had the good fortune to live in that world, it enabled them to enjoy relatively healthy lives in considerable comfort, rather than a considerably shorter one ridden by drudgery, disease and odds against survival.

Usable windmills and solar panels are also a sometime and small-scale thing, and I honestly don’t believe they will ever improve beyond small, limited domestic use. I am convinced that as governments become insanely devoted to inflicting the chimera of renewables on us all, many of us will turn to small-scale individual systems: solar panels with associated batteries, and private household generators. A YouTube channels that I follow is for a young English-Portuguese couple, renewing a ruinous stone farmstead in back-country Portugal; farming in a small way, making a small-scale and fashionably sustainable off-the-grid rural life for themselves. They noted for their viewers on a recent installment that the Iberian-wide power outage did not discommode them much at all. They have set up solar panels and batteries to power those elements of a 21st century living which they favor – like a television set, internet access, cellphones and batteries for power tools.

Some of the other YouTube off-the-grid homesteaders on my fan-list have similar set-ups. Not all are European, by the way – a good lot are American, and sometimes living way out on the fringes. They aren’t alone in setting up their own private methods of powering their houses, either. To judge by the sound of small generators in my neighborhood during a half-day long power outage last year – many of us are looking at an uncertain future as far as the main electrical grids are concerned.

What do you think? Comment as you wish, and while the lights remain on…

True Colors

22. May 2025 · Comments Off on True Colors · Categories: Ain't That America?

I have to hand it to the Great Orange One, and his cohorts – The Donald (or his staff and advisors) have a supernatural gift for deliberately or unconsciously goading individuals and establishments into revealing their true unsavory, appalling and unashamed selves. It’s been an eye-opener … although some of the revelations really aren’t much of a surprise. Everyone paying the least bit of attention to coverage of Joe Biden’s public appearances over the last half-dozen years saw that yes, indeedy, the President was wandering farther and farther off into dementia-land. Now prominent members of what I am now calling “The White House Press Corpse” claim unconvincingly that Biden’s dissolving mental condition all came as a shocking surprise to them, and the truth about that was deliberately concealed from them by his staff/doctors/the Tooth Fairy. It’s clear now – if it wasn’t before – that the official Washington Press Corpse has been paid the big bucks to be the Democrat Party in-house stenographer, and not to venture a toe into any circumstance where they might just stumble and fall over an inconvenient fact or two. Credibility of the establishment media with a good part of the news-consuming public is right down there with fast-talking hucksters advertising cheap Chineseium on late-night cable channels, and guys in flashy coats selling aluminum siding or reclaimed used cars. We’ve established what they are, and now we know what the price is.

Having ICE go after and deport illegal-alien criminals – stroke of genius. I suspect that the usual charity and so-called human rights operatives had no flaming clue how annoyed working-class Americans of every ethnic background are when it comes to illegal migrants and benefits shoppers. The benefits fraud. The fake social-security-number fraud. The undercutting of wages. The uninsured and impaired driving, with the resulting increased insurance rates for everyone else. The degradation of schools, hospital ERs, medical clinics, and whole neighborhoods. Mind-numbing violence, murders, drug- and sex-trafficking were just the rancid cherry on the whole indigestible cupcake. Getting serious and effective about clearing away the illegal blotches on the American body civic puts the charitable and human rights organs in the position of pleading special tenderness for murderers, gangsters, rapists, robbers and traffickers … rather than their usual impassioned plea for mercy on behalf of Poor, Poor, Pitiful Maria-From-South-Of-The-Border who has been blamelessly working and living in the US for decades (while still contributing her own bit to the degradation of schools, neighborhoods and medical clinics, undercutting wages and never learning English…)

The absolute prize in making it clear that only the criminal and Third World migrants need apply for assistance from official immigrant-sponsoring organizations absolutely has to go to Episcopal Migration Ministries disdaining to help white South Africans fleeing what amounts to ethnic cleansing. Gee, Episcopalians – what do you think is going on there, when a major political party holds rallies with a sing-along with lyrics urging members to “Kill the Farmer!”? And the government there has made it all legal and righty-tighty to confiscate land and property? Way to look like practicing Christians there, and doing so on the grounds of past apartheid – which hasn’t been an issue in South Africa in more than three decades – well, again, Episcopalian Church in America, nice to see that selfless Christian charity is at the forefront of whatever your beliefs are.

Watching the campus Jew-haters in full froth is … disquieting enough, but now that fringy-activist types are assassinating random Jews in the streets of D.C., and car-bombing a Palm Springs fertility clinic, I wonder now if the leftist lunatic fringe has been pushed entirely over the edge of reason. How insane are the radicals going to get, out of frustration? I don’t think too many urban law enforcement organizations will tolerate mass rioting, but sabotage, assassinations, and bombing of random local targets may be on the table. These radical activists are frustrated – and do they have much support outside of certain circles, especially now that DOGE has blocked the money stream? We’ll find out and it’ll make for a long, hot, violent summer, in that case. Your thoughts?

Fone Fakery & Other Follies

13. May 2025 · Comments Off on Fone Fakery & Other Follies · Categories: Ain't That America?

This may just be a curious coincidence, but during the recent brief period in which India and Pakistan appeared on the verge of all total thermonuclear war, my daughter and I noticed that the number of spam phone calls and messages received on our cellphones fell off precipitously. It also just may be a coincidence that when we answer somewhat questionable phone calls, which we must for business reasons – quite often we wind up having a brief conversation with a person speaking English, often very bad English, with a marked Indian/South Asian accent. Neither of us cannot limit ourselves to answering calls only from a contact list as is often recommended, since the spam organizations have begun to spoofing local numbers, and we can’t totally ignore local calls. My cellphone is the main conduit for potential clients to connect with the Teeny Publishing Bidness, and my daughters’ cellphone is similarly the main method of communicating with new and existing real estate clients and realtors.

Honestly, I feel rather sorry for anyone from the Indian sub-continent honestly trying to make a legitimate career in the US in the customer service/public relations field. After years of spam calls, attempted shakedowns from persons with that accent representing themselves to be officers of the law, the IRS, and the Social Security Administration, from banks, debt collectors, and most recently – administrators of the toll roads – my initial reaction and shared with many others, is to hang up so fast that the person on the other end will have their ears ring like the gong that started off old British movies from the J. Arthur Rank Organization. Such spammy-scammy callers – even if the accent isn’t suspect – often also betray a distinct lack of familiarity regarding how American civil authorities really operate. This very week, both my daughter and I both received the following text message (errors and typos included):
“Final notice: Enforcement will begin after May 14st. As of today, your tolls are still unpaid. If you still don/’t pay your tolls tomorrow, you will face the following consequences:
The DMV will suspend your vehicle.
You will face legal action and damage to your credit
You may be considered an illegal driver
Please pay before enforcement”
Pay Now: (link omitted. Of course I don’t click on such things. I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. This particular toll-road scam has been repeated so often that the Texas DMV now has a title page warning users about it and specifically including a statement that their department has absolutely nothing to do with collecting tolls.)

Well, it was rather nice to have the number of spammy-scammy calls and messages fall off, especially the ones which faked local numbers. I know that the Trump Administration has a lot on it’s governmental and law-enforcement plate at this moment, but I really do wish that someone high up in the Federal Communications Commission would eventually get around to turning loose the DOGEs of war on those parties enabling the whole ecosystem of domestic number-spoofing and scammy-spam-calling. At the very least, hit the spam-call boiler rooms with international law enforcement: being a consistent, ongoing annoyance ought to earn some serious penalties, in my opinion. Your thoughts and recommendations?

The Vanished World

01. May 2025 · Comments Off on The Vanished World · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Fun With Islam, Memoir, Military

I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*

The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving ad doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.

But by 1947, the ‘Raj’ was simply closing up shop; grievously wounded by the late war and the horrible post-atomic world, the establishment was packing up and going home, leaving India and the soon-to-be-separate Pakistan to their own devices, for which the best of the British hoped well, but weren’t holding their breath on it. The various garrisons, clubs, schools, amusements and institutions which catered to or supported the British establishment in India faced an uncertain future, if they weren’t closing down entirely. The novel touches on this soon-to-be-vanished world, which once seemed monolithic and unchanging, but which turned out to be ephemeral. In almost no time at all, the largest part left was either in the history books or living in the memories of those diminishing few who had lived in it.

I can only think that one of the reasons that I felt such a strong sense of affinity was that I also was a resident in an ephemeral world – the network of overseas American bases where I lived and worked in the 1980s and early 90s. Sondrestrom AB closed; the concrete barracks building that I lived in is now a B&B, hosting those with a taste for remote adventuring. Hellenikon AB closed, and the base buildings demolished to create the main venue for the 2004 Summer Olympics … but the facilities were abandoned and looted of useful materials before another decade passed. The American side of Zaragoza AB reverted entirely to the Spanish Air Force, as did Torrejon AB, near to Madrid. The bases are still there – but the American units are all but gone. The base at Adana/Incirlik in Turkey, hugely favored in my day as a wonderful shopping venue and a great place to serve an accompanied tour with your family, is presently anything but a safe tour. Now it’s an unaccompanied tour, and if I read the military media correctly, only absolutely essential functions are present there now. No more shopping excursions organized by the spouses’ clubs to purchase rugs, brass, art, jewelry and oriental antiques. Just about every one of the American bases in Germany closed up or downsized radically. The American military presence in Europe slowly began contracting after the fall of the Berlin Wall – which makes sense, really, but for military members who spent much of their adult lives there (or child dependents who went to US schools overseas) there is a sense of loss, knowing that those establishments are no longer there.

Only the memories remain, photographs, and souvenir mementos. The matter of memory, though, brings me around to M.M. Kaye; she had a good relationship with her parents, who seem to have been interesting and talented people, who had fascinating careers, and shared their memories of the prime of their lives at Britain’s peak on the late 19th century. In turn, she put the incidents of their lives into a memoir – so the memories are not entirely lost. This reminds me again of a conversation with another writer of historical fiction: suppose, we reasoned (we were about the same age, with parents born around 1930) that one of our parents at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to the oldest person that they knew then, who told them stories of their lives. So that person would have been born between 1850-1860, with memories of the American Civil War, and the aftermath, the Lincoln assassination, the wild post-war west, of wagon trains, Indian wars and Jesse James. Now, we speculated – suppose that person, born in 1850 0r 1860 – at the age of ten or twelve, spoke to and listened to stories told by the oldest person that they knew – say around 1865. That senior citizen would have been born perhaps in 1775, and might have had childhood recollections of the Revolution, of seeing General Washington and his rebel army marching past, heard tales of the original Boston Tea Party, heard the bells announcing the Declaration of Independence.
It was an interesting thought – that even as we might seem distant from historical events of the recent past, perhaps we are really only three or four lives removed from distant history.
Comment as you wish.

*The mystery itself is fair enough – the eventual reveal of the murderer as a deep-cover Soviet agent is quite startling, because that well-drawn character has been near-front and center for most of the book. From a plotting standpoint, I would have liked to have seen a few more scattered hints of Communist sympathies on that character’s part. As another character commented, “The life of the party … but no one ever suspected which Party!”

Frivolous Expenditures

28. April 2025 · Comments Off on Frivolous Expenditures · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

The final mortgage payment was made early this month – thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which I had been considering for quite a while – to whit, a Sodastream unit, to make carbonated beverages. I’ve never really liked soft drinks, but I do like plain carbonated water; no sweetener, no flavorings. The bottled kind tends to go flat almost as soon as the bottle is opened. Although the plain unflavored HEB house brand in aluminum cans is acceptable, the cans take up space on the shelf and in the recycle bin. A couple of years ago, we tried out a countertop unit that made carbonated beverages, (A freebie from Amazon Vine) and it was ok, but the CO2 cartridges were expensive and didn’t really last very long at all – so, back to the drawing board. I had heard good things about Sodastream, not the least of it being that they are made in Israel. So, I ordered a Sodastream package from Amazon which came with three one-liter bottles, two CO2 cartridges and two small bottles unsweetened cherry and lime flavors. A couple of days of use and I am pretty happy with it. The CO2 cartridge attached very easily, the bottle of cold water hooks up readily, and you can choose three degrees of bubblization. Now as soon as we go through the last three cases of HEB-brand bubbly water that my daughter bought because there was an offer to buy two, get the third one free – we’ll be Sodastreaming, exclusively.

The other semi-frivolous purchase was a bookshelf… you do know that we have a lot of books? Yeah, I was scrolling down through a friends’ FB page, and encountered a short video ad for a tall, six-level rotating bookshelf, which supposedly could hold 300+ books, while only taking up a small amount of floor space. Well, my attention was grabbed. The house is small, the existing bookshelves overflow as it is, what with the collections for research,  general history,  Texiana,  books for pleasure reading, those copies of books published by the Teeny Publishing Bidness, Wee Jamie’s overflowing collection … and one of the bookshelves so designated was an inexpensive folding number that I bought in Greece which has begun to fall apart. And that corner of the home office was in a horrendous state anyway … So, I found the exact same six-level rotating bookshelf on Amazon and ordered it. Putting it together was a bit tricky; it took the efforts of both of us and a stepstool. While it’s constructed of thick bamboo panels, there are reinforced panels and lots of flat-head screws connecting all shelves and the upright panels. I’ve loaded in all the levels, starting at the bottom and so far, it’s holding up well. The unit only occupies a small footprint, relatively speaking, rotates easily enough, and each of the six levels holds anywhere from 35-25 books. (More, in the case of very skinny volumes, less when it comes to brick-thick doorstoppers like J. Martin Hunter’s Trail-drivers of Texas.) Swapping out the old bookshelf for the tall rotating shelf meant reorganizing the existing shelves, rearranging stuff, throwing away things like owners’ manuals for appliances which had long since worn out and junked, or been given away … and turning up odd items, like some letters from my grandmothers posted to me in the early 1980s, an envelope of photo negatives processed at the AAFEs in Greece, and a Laura Ashley home goods catalog from 1986. No, I’m not a hoarder. I just loved the Laura Ashley English country cottage look. I kept that catalog as a memento and wish that I had also saved out some ‘80s Banana Republic catalogues. I loved the original,  high-quality Banana Republic items, and their catalogs were literate and fun to read…

I am already thinking about another rotating shelf…

Passed Forgetting

18. April 2025 · Comments Off on Passed Forgetting · Categories: Ain't That America?, Health and Wellness, History, Rant

So, Ed Driscoll at Instapundit is dedicated to posting Covid retrospectives along the nature of “On this Day Five Years Ago…” Some comments appended to his various posts over the last few weeks express exasperation with his apparent complete inability (or disinclination) when it comes to pithy summarization, and others express exasperation with remembering the Covidiocy day by day and blow by blow. For myself, I have a mouse with a scroll-wheel and can use it. As for the second category of comments – yes, we should not forget what Covid did to us.
Yes, we ought to remember every day, every jot and tittle of such state-sponsored torments piled upon us in the name of the Unparalleled Epidemic Danger From the Covid Plague (eleventy!!!), and the identities and employers of those individuals who either inflicted those torments on the public or cheered them on through media, both Established and Social. We ought to remember every detail of civic lockdowns demanded by governors and local officials getting in touch with their inner authoritarian or feeling obliged to respond to that manufactured panic – especially those who flouted the rules that they inflicted on everyone else. (Looking at you especially, Governor “Hair-gel” Newsome, frolicking with friends at the French Laundry.)

We should recollect the useless mask mandates, the hysterical demands for social distancing and commands to follow the arrows on the floor of those retail establishments which were allowed to remain open … and how other, more local and smaller enterprises had to close – too many of them for good, devastating owners and employees. We should also recall, vividly, how the National Establishment Media worked overtime to scare the ever-living snot out of the general public … and not forget the media scorn poured out lavishly on those handful of brave medical souls who proposed alternate, widely available and inexpensive remedies. Yes, we ought to consider again that curious question; if Covid was so potentially deadly, then why weren’t homeless street people being buried by the hundreds every day in mass graves. And why the emergency Covid hospitals and the military hospital ships eventually went away or were disassembled … after standing empty for days and weeks. We never did get a good reason for all that from the usual media talking heads…

We need to remember cancellations of every sort of activity, from church services, private celebrations like weddings and public celebrations like school graduations. The academic damage done to school children whose schools went to distance learning was perhaps mitigated by the home-schooling and tiny pod-learning arrangements created by parents suddenly and horribly brought face to face with how awful public school curricula actually was, and how demented and abusive too darned many teachers actually were – one small ray of light in the darkness of the Covidiocy. We should be reminded again of how farewell visits to dying relatives in hospitals and nursing homes were cruelly forbidden in the name of safety, and so were public funeral services for those we lost. We ought also to remember that there were people with existing medical challenges whose routine and regular appointments were cancelled as non-urgent in the name of the so-called Covid emergency – and whose conditions worsened over the period. (There is justification for sequestering the elderly and chronically ill, and for those with chronic conditions at a heightened risk to voluntarily isolate themselves.) We should recall that every large gathering save urban riots and protests over the death of a career junkie and part-time violent criminal was cancelled.

Above all the rest of those indignities, torments and abuses, we should recall the plight of those who were forced, as a condition of continuing employment to submit to an experimental called vaccine and boosters; those who appear to have had their health irreparably damaged by getting those vaccines and boosters, and those who refused and were fired from their job for doing so. There probably will never be any suitable justice meted out for those who rushed a faulty product into use, or for those who demanded that it be administered willy-nilly.

When it comes to damage this complete, there is no forgive and forget, as much as those responsible in any degree for the world-wide reaction to Covid might wish it. There will be no forgetting, and very little forgiveness.
And just for the topping on the cake – this link, concerning the origins of what I had been calling the Commie Crud.

Those Who Dare Not Be Named

10. April 2025 · Comments Off on Those Who Dare Not Be Named · Categories: Ain't That America?, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine...

I have been provided with several rations’ worth of bitter amusement over the last few years , when reading various news stories, especially those concerning incidents of murder, rape, mayhem and property crime – most of which can be laid at the door of a certain violently dysfunctional urban demographic – and then comparing the sympathetic manner in which that specific demographic is presented in pop entertainment.

Yes, just as the sun rises in the east, one can absolutely count on black urban youth being cast as hapless, misunderstood yet endearing rascals, automatically the prime suspect in a murder actually committed by the prep-school son of a white Wall Street magnate, or a deranged Christian minister, or some middle-class white schlub with a dirty secret – as is usually wrapped up in the final ten minutes of an hour-long episode.

Just as certainly, one may also count upon reading the headline about a mass brawl at an entertainment venue, fast-food place, business or at concert, a random violent street shooting/stabbing or a particularly nasty street beat-down … nine out of ten, one scrolls down to the story, or the pictures accompanying the story showing or describing the participants in brief detail, and says to oneself, “Self … yeah, just what I thought.”

Everybody knows that so-called urban black youths are the ones responsible for committing a staggering percentage of reported and unreported violent crime: murder, rape, robbery-assault or just plain assault. Everybody knows, except perhaps foreign viewers doing an epic binge of American crime drama. And almost everyone would prefer to deny this knowledge publicly. Generally, whites – especially the more prosperous whites in government, academia or media – don’t want to be tarred with the brush of accusations of racism by others in pointing this out or even admitting to acting preemptively on that knowledge or on the advice of John Derbyshire.

Prosperous and middle-class blacks are, I think, simultaneously embarrassed by the murderous antics of the black underclass and confounded by their own success in rising above it and in doing so they have somehow lost authenticity. Getting an education, making a good living, and creating a functional, affectionate family is somehow “acting white” and to be scorned by “real” black folk – the urban black underclass. Somehow, they have become the element setting the tone of the black minority culture. Which is purely ironic, as the black urban underclass has become everything that 19th century slaveholding racists insisted that blacks were: ignorant, illiterate, dissolute, violent at the slightest provocation and crudely lascivious. (Frederick Douglass must be spinning in his grave like a Black & Decker drill these days.) Thomas Sowell wrote an essay positing that the black underclass picked up these unsavory traits wholesale from the white Southern rednecks; a valid point, but the white redneck underclass hardly can be said to steering white culture generally. Instead, we repeat stories of Florida Man’s antics and snicker heartlessly.

But the urban black underclass has a powerful death-grip on black American culture, demonstrated by the new, shiny AOC-like star in the Democrat Party, Jasmine Crockett. Rep. Crockett, elected by a largely black district in Dallas, Texas to the US House of Representatives was the recipient of a privileged upbringing, including private school education and college. But she seems to find it necessary to present in public as a semi-literate, semi-articulate, potty-mouthed ‘hood ratlette with a resentful chip on her shoulder the size of the battleship Missouri. Nothing like the educated, articulate person that she really ought to be, given that background. That’s the other sad irony – that successful, prosperous leaders find it somehow necessary to take social cues from the worst and dysfunctional. Again – Frederick Douglass … et cetera. Too late for her parents to get a refund of the tuition to that nice Catholic girls’ school, I guess.
If there is any chance of positive change in the black community, it will have to come from inside the demographic. There’s nothing that outsiders can do, or want to do, or would even be welcome. All that is possible for us –white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever – to do is to quietly avoid the dangerous demographic to the best degree that we can. Comment as you wish, and dare.

Part 2: The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru

29. March 2025 · Comments Off on Part 2: The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru · Categories: Air Navy, History

(This is going to be a three-part story: I had other projects today and could only finish this second part.)

The newly-rechristened Krait, with the old unreliable engine now replaced, had a full crew at last for Operation Jaywick. A chief engineer, Leading Stoker Paddy McDowell, a WWI Navy veteran, and an assistant engineer, another experienced sailor, Leading Seaman “Cobber” Cain. They also had recruited a radio operator, Leading Telegraphist “Horrie” Young, and a cook: Corporal Andy Crilley, a soldier who was about to be discharged on medical grounds but wanted to stay in the war. Meanwhile Donald Davidson had also selected five men from a pool of naval volunteers that he had personally trained for months in mission-essential skills: the art of silently maneuvering the Folboat canoes in all kinds of water, rappelling, navigation, stalking an enemy, the use of weapons, both bullet and bladed, as well as care of and use of explosives. The five chosen were not just skilled in those deadly arts, but also mature, steady and temperamentally suited for a grueling mission in which teamwork would be essential.
By early August, 1943, the Krait was ready to depart Cairns for Exmouth, on Australia’s western coast, carrying a mixed and eccentric crew of soldiers and sailors … but to where after that, exactly? Only Lyon, Davidson, Page and Carse knew their eventual destination: Lyon because he was overall in charge, and Carse because he was now commander of the deceptively ordinary Krait. The Krait’s four holds were packed jam-full of supplies; basic food and water, including rations sealed into tins which could be cached for the raiding party somewhere on land. Lt. Page had been a third-year medical student before the war, and as such, would be their doctor in a medical emergency. (The medical supplies also included rum, whiskey and gin – for celebrating if the mission was successful, and cyanide tablets in the dire event of failure and capture by the Japanese.)

A stock of English and American cigarettes was also part of the cargo, along with a quantity of Dutch gold guilder coins, should it become necessary to offer bribes to susceptible locals. The heaviest items of cargo were the whole reason for the Krait’s secret journey: forty-five magnetic limpet mines, 150 pounds of plastique explosive, and 200 grenades, along with sufficient ammunition for the Krait’s assortment of Lewis and Bren guns, and side arms. Another precaution; items like cooking pots, plates, sunglasses and toothbrushes all be of Japanese make – lest something dropped overboard give the game away to an alert and suspicious Japanese. Engineer McDowell had served in WWI Q-ships – armed warships disguised as harmless merchantmen, in order to entice submarines to surface, and was wise in the way of this kind of marine subterfuge. Once departing from Exmouth and on the way north, every man would be required to apply brown skin dye and dress in simple cloth sarongs, the better to serve the illusion of the Krait as a harmless and ordinary trading vessel.

After a fairly uneventful transit from Cairns across the top of Australia, the Krait arrived at Exmouth, with not much more drama then those unaccustomed to the open sea being vilely seasick. They intended departing north on the 1st of September, 1943. Within minutes, though, the propellor shaft broke; the Krait sailed the following day towards the Lombok, after swift repairs made by the mechanics of an American submarine repair ship, conveniently anchored nearby. (The American mechanics advised them that the repairs probably wouldn’t hold up for very long and to get permanent repairs done as soon as possible.) “Ta, thanks!” was pretty much the response, and Ted Carse turned the Krait on a heading north, towards the Lombok Strait, between Bali and a chain of islands that terminated in Flores and Timor.
It was only at that point, far out at sea, when Captain – now Major Lyon – called the crew together and formally told them where they were heading. Likely this only confirmed what they had long suspected – an attack on a port well inside Japanese-held territory. Once through the Lombok Strait, they would skirt Borneo, until well into the Java and South China Sea, avoiding any contact at all with other ships and boats, even the smallest, which might challenge them and give the operation away. Three two-man teams would be dropped off on an island close to Singapore; Lyon himself, with Donaldson and Page, with three of the trained volunteers – a fourth team to be held in reserve. After that briefing, they put away their uniforms, applied brown dye to their skin – which was rather more convincing on some of the men than others – and put on sarongs. From then on – no drinking or smoking, light discipline would be enforced rigorously at night, and all trash discarded overboard would be put into sealed, weighted tins, so as to leave no trace of their passage. They would also, when near land, keep as quiet as possible, knowing that voices and sound carried far, over water. They also broke out and deliberately dirtied a Japanese flag, before raising it in place of their Blue Ensign.

(Again—to be continued. I pulled a lot of detail on this from an account by Ronald Mckie, The Heroes, which in turn was the basis for a TV miniseries. The story of Operation Jaywick and the later and disastrous Operation Rimau are well-known in Australia – but not so much in US pop cultural knowledge of operations in that part of the world.)

The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru

27. March 2025 · Comments Off on The Secret Journey of the Kofuku Maru · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, History, In the Navy

When I came around to writing a novel set in the World War II timeframe a couple of years ago, one of the main characters spent the war years, first in Malaya and then Australia. This meant a deep dive into the war along the southern Pacific front, and life in Australia during that period. We Americans had Pearl Harbor, defeat of our military in the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, Wake and Midway, Guadalcanal and Tarawa; Australia had the loss of their troops in Singapore and Malaya, the occupation of Sumatra, Japanese air raids on Darwin, and the war next door in New Guinea.
The fall of Singapore struck a particularly heavy blow to the Allies in 1942: so close to Australia, with many personal and economic connections. Refugees from British and Dutch interests in southwest Asia fled in the direction of Australia and India in anything that could float and escape the deadly notice of the Japanese. One of those fortunate vessels was the Kofuku Maru, a 70-ft Japanese-built wooden craft, with a mainsail and an engine. It was constructed in the late 1930s to support the fishing fleet based out of Singapore, bringing water and food out to the fishing fleet, and collecting the catch for sale in the marketplace. Confiscated by British authorities after war broke out, by early spring of 1942 the Kofuku Maru was under the command of a volunteer Australian merchant mariner in his sixties named Bill Reynolds. Reynolds was tasked with evacuating civilians from the Malay peninsula, first to Sumatra, and then to Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

During this fraught period, Reynolds met up with a British Army intelligence officer, Captain Ivan Lyon, who was on pretty much the same mission – organizing an escape line from Singapore to Ceylon and India. When it became clear that Singapore would surrender to the Japanese, Reynolds made one last trip, all the way to Ceylon. At some point, someone accustomed to thinking ahead realized the sneaky possibilities in using a relatively slow and decrepit-appearing Japanese-built boat which no one in the maritime Far East would look at twice. Supposedly, Reynolds had already noted that Japanese aircraft attacking refugee boats fleeing Singapore ignored the Kofuku Maru. Perhaps Reynolds said so to Captain Lyon.

Lyon was career Army, from a family of career soldiers. He was driven and intense, rumored then to be connected to the Bowes-Lyon family, whose younger daughter was then Queen of England. (He wasn’t.) Lyon had been stationed in the Far East for nearly five years, long enough to have had an Oriental-style tiger tattoo on his chest. He was very familiar with the territory, having spent a lot of leisure time sailing. He was married to the daughter of a French official in Indochina, with whom he had a baby son. Wife and child were interned after the ship they were traveling on was intercepted and turned over to the Japanese.

After the surrender of Singapore and the occupation of much of the south-western Pacific by Japan, the Kofuko Maru was sent to northern Australia, into the inventory of a shadowy joint Allied intelligence operation that went by the noncommittal initials ZES, for “Z Experimental Station” or sometimes “Z Special Unit”, based at a nondescript compound near Cairns, Queensland. Bill Reynolds and Ivan Lyon also gravitated into the “Z” organization, a varied collection of people with outside-the-box notions about how to fight the Japanese which had been accumulating by a kind of organizational osmosis as 1942 wore on. One of those notions was generated by a member of “Z” who had formerly worked in New Guinea as an oil exploration geologist and knew the territory well. He suggested a strike at Japanese supping in the port of Rabaul, using teams of agents in two-man collapsible canoes, called Folboats, dropped off by submarine at a distance from Rabaul. The teams would hide out on a nearby island, paddle into the harbor at night and attach magnetic “limpet” mines to selected ships, mines timed to detonate hours later. Planning and training for such an attack got underway, but never came off; the fighting bypassed Rabaul, and the “Z” command echelon eventually canceled that project as risking too many resources for not much gain.

But the novel notion of limpet mines and Folboats remained in play – just that the focus of such an operation moved to a new direction: Singapore. About the time that the Kofuku Maru arrived at the “Z” compound – Captain Lyons began recruiting a team; a mixed lot of Australian and English soldiers and sailors. The Kofuku Maru needed a new engine, one which wasn’t held together with spit and bailing wire – and now she had a new name: Krait, after a small and deadly venomous snake common in India.

Recruited to captain the Krait was a veteran sailor and navigator named Ted Carse, who when asked in the initial interview if he could take a ship from Melbourne to San Francisco replied, “I could take her anywhere.” He had graduated as a naval cadet at the end of the first war, served in peacetime for ten years, got out of the service, and then knocked around the world as an able seaman, among several other eccentric career paths. Carse had barely made it back into military service, due to chronic bronchial troubles, but in the war emergency of 1942, warm, breathing and experienced was good enough for recruiters. Another key recruit to the team as Lyon’s second in command was Royal Navy officer Donald Davidson, of whom it was said that if Edmund Hillary hadn’t climbed Mt. Everest first, Donald Davidson would have. He was a maniac for physical fitness and an expert canoeist, an able outdoorsman, and had worked in Burma and the Far East for years. Australian Army Lieutenant Bob Page rounded out the officer cadre on what would be called Operation Jaywick. Page was the son of the son of deputy administrator on New Guinea, captured by Japanese, and assumed to be dead in sinking of a Japanese prison ship. Like Lyon, Page had very personal reason for animus against the invading Japanese.
(To be continued….)

Advice Unspoken

26. March 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Air Force

This week, my daughter had to get a new veteran ID card, since she had her VA disability upgraded. Yes, service in the Marines for two strenuous hitches came at a physical price. She made an appointment at the Randolph AFB ID section to bring in all the supporting paperwork, and then we were reminded that my original issue blue retiree ID card wouldn’t be valid after the end of this month, never mind that it was supposed to be valid indefinitely. So she suggested that I come with her to the appointment and see if the issuing office couldn’t process both of ours at the same whack. This necessitated bringing Wee Jamie along, in the folding Cocomelon stroller that he is about two inches from out growing entirely.

Anyway, her appointment was early enough in the business day that there wasn’t much of a crowd, although I expect there will be a rush this week of retiree veterans like myself, replacing our old blue veteran ID.

To our relief, they were agreeable to doing both of our ID cards on the same appointment, even if I was a last-minute addition to the schedule. The tech processing our new cards was a female airman one-striper – competent and well-spoken, but seeming so very, very young. (Baby troops are so cute when they are little, and just barely housebroken…) Anyway, there was a bit of amusement when she initially read my daughter’s documents as having been a Marine at the rank of captain, and both my daughter and I burst out laughing. No, we were both NCOs and fiercely proud of it, although I expounded a bit on how sometimes certain people in certain skills have an invisible, much higher rank than their actual pay grade. The example I gave was that of a CID NCO, and of my own, when I was doing the regular radio news program at AFKN-Seoul.

I should have mentioned other specialties which have the invisible higher rank in the grand military scheme of things, and thus are sought out and respected by those in the know: the junior enlisted computer or mechanical expert who is gifted beyond all expectation, the clerk who can sort  out the most stubborn administrative tangle, that one NCO who knows everyone and plays the system like YoY o Ma plays the cello – they have an invisible rank and respect far beyond their actual stripes. My daughter added another piece of advice, which may have been more relevant to the Marine Corps, which run maybe 3% female, than to the Air Force, which stood at 13-15%. Her suggestion was to network extensively with other female NCOs, when our baby troop achieves that rank …and then we finished up getting the new ID cars, and left, with Wee Jamie still behaving very well.

But as we left, I thought of all the advice that we could have added; that a female NCO rightfully ought to keep her personal life a mystery to co-workers. That when suggesting some new process or way of doing things to a supervisor, one ought to volunteer to do the hard work on it yourself – because there will inevitably be work involved with a new process. That there are only about six different ways to do anything at all in the military, all of them about equally efficient, and usually it’s just a matter of habit and inertia that favors one above the other five …

Then I remembered that we were about old enough to have been mother and grandmother to the young one-striper, and realized that – well, there are some things that one has to figure out on ones’ own to really, really stick.

Be to her, Persephone,

All the things I might not be:

Take her head upon your knee.

She that was so proud and wild,

Flippant, arrogant and free,

She that had no need of me,

Is a little lonely child

Lost in Hell,—Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee:

Say to her, “My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here.”

 

Prayer To Persephone – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ouroboro-ed

20. March 2025 · Comments Off on Ouroboro-ed · Categories: Geekery, That's Entertainment!

The ouroboros was an ancient iconographic depicting a snake or a dragon biting on it’s own tail, and used to symbolize a mad variety of concepts in different cultures: birth, death, the continuity of life, disorder, yin and yang, infinity, circular reasoning, elements of alchemy … basically, a handy and interesting picture of some kind of circular concept. The notion of an organism busily munching down on it’s own substance also occurred to me on contemplating the likely movie disaster that will be the live-action version (with CGI-generated dwarves, so exactly how live-action is it, really?) of Disney’s Snow White. Which hotly-anticipated disaster is finally lumbering into the port of general release this week, where it is expected to crash into the dock and immolate. Not only may it likely crash and burn itself, but also the future career of Rachael Zegler … who might be able to sing and dance, but otherwise off-screen seems to have all the charm and tempting appeal of a liverwurst sandwich forgotten in the back of the employee’s break room refrigerator for a month or so.

So, no – won’t be darkening the door of the multiplex anytime soon for this expensive and much-delayed botch job, or waste hours watching when it goes appears on streaming video (as it probably will, and in record time.) As a somewhat creative person, who has long been in the business (if you can call it that) of providing diversion and entertainment, I have often wondered … why? Why go through the long, expensive process of doing a live-action movie version of an animated feature film anyway; following a carbon-copy of the script, duplicating the animated characters with actors which sort of resemble them, and copying the background scenery and setting with artfully designed sets.

Well, obviously, doing a live-action version of a popular animated movie must have paid off in the past, or Disney wouldn’t have done it more than once. Someone in the accounting department of the House of Mouse must have tallied up the expenses and projected profits and calculated a win. I guess there is also an element of proving that yes, it can be done. It probably also makes sense to remind the audience of Disney-created characters, images and stories, a decade or so after an animated feature has made bank, and to get another bite of the merchandising apple … but creating a world through animation has really no limitations. Even movie magic can only go so far, in a live-action duplication.

There is another downside to the live-action restyling of animated movies, and I wonder if anyone at the higher echelons at the House of Mouse has considered it. And that would be the routine practice of a live version, rather than putting the creative energy and the expense into a new animated creation, rather than just retooling a past product. There is a whole world of folk tales out there, heroes and heroines, stories, fables, amazing deeds and colorful backgrounds for original and new creations. To be fair, Disney has dabbled with a few of them. They did so very well with Mulan, with Moana, Encanto, Coco, and the Lion King; why not come up with more stories based on international folklore and backgrounds, rather than burn money doing live-action versions, as they did and are with the first two named? How long can the creative serpent come around and consume itself in reworking older creations? How long can the serpent continue, when there is nothing original and new? Discuss, if you are interested.

(Jamie the Wonder Grandson loves Moana – so did my niece and nephew, when they were his age … and no, not the least interested in the live-action version, if it is ever completed and released.)

Things Change – Not Always for the Better

16. March 2025 · Comments Off on Things Change – Not Always for the Better · Categories: Ain't That America?

’m trying to fire up a schedule of book events for 2025, this year, since Wee Jamie is old enough to be taken places that don’t interrupt his schedule too much. One of the multi-author venues that I had previously enjoyed doing was the West Texas Book and Music Festival, in Abilene – I think we made the road trip, hopscotching along back-country roads north from Junction, through Ballenger…… to Abilene at least three times. I liked it at least as much for the chance to take pictures of back-country Texas, as I did participating in a community-supported book event, with other authors, and people who liked books, and wanted to support authors, reading books, libraries and generally the community. The West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene had enough juice to invite writers who had been heard of outside of Texas as guest speakers – Elmer Kelton was one, who unfortunately passed from this vale of tears a bare month or two before I had a chance to meet him at the Festival in the fall of (gasp!) 2009. I did meet Paulette Jiles and Scott Zesh the following year, and we got some lovely photos of a balloon festival which was being held in Abilene the very same weekend.

We stayed two nights in a tiny cabin at a KOA campground in Abilene, which was the cheapest option available to us – yes, I am not so well-known that I have expenses paid. This year, for various reasons, we could afford the road-trip and two nights at a hotel or campground, so I looked up what was going on, as far as book festivals go, in Abilene – but it seems like that event has withered up and died, without a trace on social media. The Covidiocy canceled the event for 2020. I had a reply to an inquiry last year that they were already full-up, thanks for asking. I made a mental note to ask about this year, but ll the links that I have are dead, or go to the civic website.  From what I can tell, it may have been incorporated into the big yearly book event in Austin. A deep sigh, and on to investigating other small book festivals.

On the note of things that change and not for the better, my daughter and I, with Wee Jamie went to spend a Saturday in Fredericksburg. We went by way of Blanco and Johnson City, where we had done market events, and from Johnson City over so-called Texas Wine Road, through Stonewall, Grapetown and thence to Fredericksburg, with a stop at Wildseed Farms, hoping that their wildflower meadows would be in bloom – alas, too early in the year. I did see a few shy bluebonnets in a sheltered, sunny verge, and all the redbud trees are in full flower, but nothing much in comparison to what will be out in lavish bloom by the end of April. As a diversion, we counted wineries along the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg – we came up with a total of 73, although we might have double-counted some and missed a few others. The whole of Route 290 seems now to be a prolonged and long party spot these days, which might account for a great many mildly sloshed people all along Main Street.

Fredericksburg has changed, since the first few times we visited, in the late 90s – and I’m not certain it’s for the better. Maybe I just liked it when they rolled up the sidewalks at sundown, save for a few restaurants on Main Street. The Fredericksburg Herb farm was really a herb garden with candles, perfume and skin-care items for sale along with seeds and herbs, and not under different ownership as a luxury spa. The old five and dime, which didn’t take credit cards and was about the last normal retail outlet on Main, is now an upscale retailer of expensive western wear (I scoped out a pair of $700 dollar women’s boots there and winced). The Christmas store also changed hands – now upscale boutique fashion items instead of Christmas things and garden décor. A big ultra-modern new luxury hotel took over what had been a very pleasant Beaux Arts-style two-story shop building, renovated it out of all previous experience and attached it at the back into a whole new ultra-modern sprawl. Rustlin’ Robs, Dogologie (the store for all things dog, which always has a dish of water by the door for their canine friends), Der Kuchen Laden (the best little housewares shop in Texas) and the Peach House are still there, which is reassuring. But the retail outlets, restaurants and businesses have spread from Main Street to Austin and San Antonio streets, replacing the modest little early 20th century cottages and older houses. About the only good expansion that I can see is that of the Museum of the Pacific War, which went from the old Nimitz Hotel and an open-sided pole barn a few blocks distant, to a big new complex and expanded outdoor complex where they state WWII reenactor events. At a book event there a few years ago, one of the members told us that there are now more B&B beds in the downtown area than there were regular homes. I can believe it, especially after this last Saturday.

We walked up several blocks, and crossed Main Street to walk the other side, noting the crowds, and also noting that there weren’t many families with children, and hardly anyone walking with a dog on a leash or in a doggie stroller. It seemed like it was more spring-break/party city, than a quaint, old-fashioned Texas country small town with an attractive and historic downtown. My daughter says – perhaps next time, we should visit during the week – not on a Saturday or a holiday. The brush fire getting going in the afternoon of that day in the hills north of town didn’t help our mood much, what with pale beige clouds of smoke piling up like clouds, and the occasional siren on a brush fire truck roaring through town. We drove home, looking over our shoulders almost all the way.

A Serious Case of the “Mehs”

06. March 2025 · Comments Off on A Serious Case of the “Mehs” · Categories: General, Media Matters Not

It seems that the Oscars Awards happened last weekend. Was there any reason to watch four solid hours of entertainment industry self-congratulation, aside from seeing if any aspiring starlet would parade in a completely transparent dress without any undergarments to speak of. On the day following, just about all the stories about the Oscars on my guilty pleasure of a mainstream newspaper, the English Daily Mail, concerned the fashions – or the bad taste displayed thereof – on the red carpet. There was only a single story or two about the movies and the awards garnered. Although the National Establishment Media organs try to sound chipper and upbeat about the broadcast and streaming audience for the Oscars … general interest in the event seemed pretty restrained.

None of the movies up for consideration this year seemed to have made much of a splash in general release. No long lines at the theaters, no splashy cover stories in national magazines, no repeat customers telling their friends ‘you must go and see this movie!’, no packed theater showings for weeks and weeks and weeks. It seems as if whatever movie-going audience is left these days has a serious case of the “mehs.” As a commenter on another thread about the Oscars said, not only had they not seen a single one of the nominated movies – they hadn’t even heard of most of them. They appeared briefly on the multiplex marquee and then went to streaming video. A few weeks ago, the theater roof collapsed during a showing of the Captain America movie. Well, it was at an 8 PM showing on a weeknight, but there were only two people in the place for a first-run movie, which may be a sad reflection on how ‘meh’ that recent releases have become. One of the most savage comments that I saw was that the movie was so bad that the theater itself decided to commit suicide.

I’ve begun to wonder if the whole Hollywood movie and entertainment industry has been committing slow-motion suicide itself, over the last ten or fifteen years. The insistence on expensive blockbusters, the lack of originality, reliance on established comic books and well-established franchises, a tendency to let inexperience take the helm of such highly-visible and expensive projects, the insistence on preaching (assume Critical Drinker voice) “the message” – indeed, beating the audience over the head with “the message”, until the audience stays away in droves, fleeing to their archive of classic (and often much more entertaining) movies and series, foreign imports, or to gaming … repeated sexual-abuse and harassment scandals, the fact that many of the creative (or at least, well-established) Hollywood personalities are really awful, horrible, abusive people. That so many of them came out for Harris/Walz was just the sour cherry on top of the whole rancid package.

So – how much longer can the downward spiral last, while mainstream audiences flee? Will there be more independent productions, or will a kind of renewal take place? Place your bets … and have you seen anything good on screen lately?

Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After

28. February 2025 · Comments Off on Rescue 9-’49 – Or a Heroic Exploit by the 19th Century Army Officer that Fort Rucker Wasn’t Named After · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, History, Old West

Lately I have been refreshing my memory and knowledge of Gold-Rush era California. Relevant volumes are already fringed with small postit notes, making it easier for me to come back to a particularly vivid description of a place, a curious character, the presence of someone later-well-known, or an interesting yet little known turn of events. For example, William Tecumseh Sherman was in California in 1848, as the aide to the American military governor, perhaps – or maybe not – afire with impatient envy of his fellow West Point classmates who were serving in the active theater of the war with Mexico. I had wanted to work him in as a walk-on character in The Golden Road, but my main character’s adventures never intersected with WT Sherman, except for delivering a newspaper to his house in San Francisco.

Anyway, an interesting sidelight to the history of the Gold Rush happened towards the end of that first year, 1849. It seemed as if half the world rushed into California, by land, sea or a combination thereof, eager to start collecting gold nuggets as big as peas and beans (or even bigger) off the ground. Some intrepid gold-seekers came through Mexico, or across Texas and New Mexico Territory, but a substantial number came by the established route; starting from the various jumping-off places along the Mississippi-Missouri. Such adventurers surged along the Platte River to Ft. Laramie, over South Pass, to Fort Hall, the Humboldt River, then up and over the last hurdle of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At a point in present-day Nevada, the route deviated into several branches.

Those travelers – worn-down by the last few hundred miles through desert, low on supplies, having lost draft animals to hard-use, near-starvation and low-grade harassment by Indians – looked for an easier passage through the high mountains than the difficult Truckee route. They also hoped to avoid the ghastly experience of the Donner-Reed company of three years previous; caught in deep snow, with cannibalism the only alternative to death by starvation. Many chose a slightly easier passage toward the south called the Carson pass. But a portion of the late-season 49ers were diverted north, on a cutoff advertised as a short-cut to the northern gold fields – a short-cut talked up by rancher and entrepreneur Peter Lassen. Which it was, sort of … but it led through the Black Rock Desert and equally hard, waterless country, which demolished morale, supplies, and physical endurance of ‘49ers who were close to the end of all those. (A smaller, very misguided and disjointed company went even further south and blundered into – and out of the Death Valley – rescuing themselves by pluck, luck and the courage of several able members of it.)

The concerted rush of desperate and stressed overland parties arriving at the end of the traveling season gave cause for concern to the then military governor of California. That was General Persifor F. Smith, who seems to have been an able and well-thought-of regular Army officer; an indispensable, experienced but competently colorless man. Around August of 1849, General Smith received the intelligence from arriving overlanders that many parties still on the trail had fallen well behind – and horrifyingly, those parties contained many women and families. Such were still on the far side of the Sierra Nevada and likely to be in deep trouble – and deep snow, since blizzards usually began in late September. Everyone who came overland knew they had to be over the mountains by October, when heavy snow began falling in the high ranges.

General Smith swung into decisive action; he pulled $100,000.00 from his government budget earmarked for civil matters, and $12,000 in donations from residents and businesses in San Francisco, many of whom knew of the perils of the overland trail from previous personal experience. General Smith tasked one of his officers, Major Daniel H. Rucker, to head up the relief effort. Major Rucker was then 37 and had served on the frontier for the previous twelve years. He had married into the wealthy Cherokee Ross family, while serving at Fort Gibson, but his wife had died, leaving him with two surviving children. He was promoted to his rank for conspicuous gallantry in the Battle at Buena Vista, during the recent war with Mexico. Most importantly for this mission he was then serving as a member of the Quartermaster Corps and experienced in managing supplies and transport. He was also a good friend of frontiersman Kit Carson and would eventually be the father-in-law of Philip Sheridan.

Early in September, Major Rucker arrived in Sacramento, the nexus for travel to the gold mines, and the traditional terminus for the overland trail. He had planned on dispatching a pair of well-equipped caravans of pack-mules to follow back along the Truckee and the Carson pass trails, and had purchased wagons, draft animals and supplies and hired men. They would have plenty of food, and plenty of extra animals, resupplying and assisting the lagging, hungry travelers as they went … and their orders were to go as far back long the trail until they were certain there were no more straggling travelers. In talking with recently-arrived ‘49ers, Major Rucker learned to his horror that a substantial number of emigrants had been decoyed onto the new Lassen cutoff, on the assumption that it was a short cut. It wasn’t – and it ran through desert and mountains even more desolate than the 40-Mile desert between the Humboldt Sink and the Truckee River. Immediately, Major Rucker organized a third supply-and-rescue caravan with himself in the lead.
The first relief force worked their way along the Truckee route. By early October, they were able to assure themselves that there was no one else needing help, and they moved to the Carson route – thirty men and a hundred miles, where the need was dire. Not only were those late travelers in danger of repeating the fatal experience of the Donners and the Reeds in the snow – they had already lost their draft animals and run through all their food supplies, trudging through the desert on foot, carrying what little they could salvage. Some had been surviving by salvaging flesh from dead oxen and mules. But the last party on the on the Carson trail were still in good order and assumed that they still had plenty of time. They took some convincing from the rescue caravan to ditch some of their gear and hurry the women and children along. That party, once brought to see reason, made it over the mountain pass and safely into the settlements by the time the first winter storms began late in October.

Major Rucker and his team, meanwhile, were heading north, where another epic of snow and starvation was about to unfold. Not only was the Lassen trail even rougher than the Truckee and Carson routes – but it dumped out a good two hundred miles away from the gold fields. Practically everyone who followed it to the end wished that they hadn’t – and many suspected (with reason) that Peter Lassen had played it up in order to enrich his own enterprises from the passing traffic on the trail. (Lassen was killed by parties unknown, a decade later, under mysterious circumstances.) Rucker’s team, working back along the trail encountered the most heartrending scenes of sickness and deprivation. In his after-action report to General Smith, Rucker wrote: “A more pitiable sight I had never before beheld. There were cripples from scurvy, and other diseases; women, prostrated by weakness, and children, who could not move a limb. In advance of the wagons were men mounted on mules, who had to be lifted on or off their animals, so entirely disabled had they become from the effect of scurvy.” Being a stalwart gentleman of that era – as well as a widower and father – must have lent special urgency to Rucker’s determination to assist as many stricken and desperate travelers as possible. By the end of November, his people had rounded up the last of the stragglers along Lassen’s trail and conveyed them to relative safety. Of course, they weren’t able to save everyone who ran into trouble on the last months of 1849 – but they were seen as rescuing angels by many men and women – who were pretty certain they would have died, otherwise. Among the families rescued by Rucker’s task force were the parents and older sister of philosopher and idealist Josiah Royce.

When Daniel Rucker died in 1910, he had served for 45 years, almost all of his service after 1850 in the Quartermaster Corps, including throughout the Civil War. Eventually he was promoted to the post of Quartermaster General. He married again, the year after the eventful rescue mission in California – it was a daughter of this marriage who later married Phillip Sheridan. Should the DOD ever move to restore the Rucker name to Fort Rucker, they couldn’t do any better than naming it after Daniel Rucker, Army Quartermaster General.

The Great Unraveling

24. February 2025 · Comments Off on The Great Unraveling · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Media Matters Not

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collection of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.
And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

It may very well turn out that we all were – just as it has turned out that USAID grants went out to support practically every cause beloved by progressives nationally and world-wide. To non-governmental organizations playing hopscotch with international migrants. To champion the causes of LGBTWXYZLOL-whatever, around the world in our own back yard and in our elementary schools. To progressive media voices, like the BBC. What the ever-loving H-E-double hockey sticks? Don’t those smooth-talking euro-snob Jew-haters get enough moola from their own government, they have to vacuum up from us as well, like a coke addict snorting a line as long as the US-Canada border?

And while I’m on the topic of our very own dear media, what about the ongoing slaughter of careers and the driving rain of pink slips falling at CBS and NBC? Joy Reid, Lester Holt and a other expensive performers are being pried out of their comfortable sinecures. Personalities whom I have never particularly followed and only hear about when they have been spectacularly stupid on camera and the conservative blogosphere takes notice. I imagine their superiors pried them loose, like a dentist with an impacted molar – but why now? Is it because top management at the various media enterprises have suddenly realized with the election of Trump that a large chunk of the public ignores them – and they have not anything like the power that they thought they had? Have they figured out that advertising on their programs was money wasted, and business sponsors know it? This is a new world for our national establishment media organs, where CBS Sixty Minutes counts for naught, and a podcaster like Joe Rogan may have put Trump and Vance over the top with an important segment of the voting public through doing searching, free-form long format interviews.

Or could it be that laundered government funds were holding up our own media, at least as much as paid advertising? Now that such funds are being short-stopped – is that another reason for the collapsing of our media’s house of cards now that the gravy train has come to a halt?
Comment as you wish and have knowledge.

In At the Beginning

18. February 2025 · Comments Off on In At the Beginning · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Memoir, War

Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood-of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

We were relieved when it was all ended in 1972 – you have no idea of how the horror lifted, or maybe you do, if you are of an age to remember. And then horrified by the pictures of the scramble to get Americans and those Vietnamese citizens unfortunate to be American-adjacent and thus fearful of North Vietnam reprisals barely three years later. It seemed as if all the horrors were crashing in on us and the South Vietnamese again. The mobs of frantic Vietnamese at the gates of the embassy, helicopters loading up and taking off from the pad on the roof of the US Embassy, small boats laden to the gunwales with frantic Vietnamese families setting out from the shore in hopes of being rescued by ocean-going ships waiting offshore … The North Vietnamese had won, after all – and was there anything that we could do for people who had been our allies?

It seemed that there was something that we could do; the pastor of the church we attended at the time sent me as a representative of our congregation to a meeting to discuss what steps our denomination could take to sponsor refugee families through the auspices of Lutheran Social Services. Within weeks, I was neck deep in a local ad-hoc organization since we decided that our congregation did not have enough resources to sponsor refugees. By sponsorship, I mean that everything to assist a family or two of Vietnamese refugees over their first months or years in the US would come out of our resources: rent, fitting out a residence with the bare necessities, food assistance, transportation, finding employment, schooling, language lessons if necessary, and help coping with various bureaucracies.
So our church clubbed together with several other congregations and some local chapters of fraternal organizations – the Lions club was one. We took stock of what we offer and informed Lutheran Social Services that we thought we could sponsor a large extended family of up to 25 people. (It was our understanding that was the greatest need – support for large families.) We were informed several weeks later that we would be sponsoring three small families and three single young men – teenaged boys, really. We quickly found a small house and two apartments to rent and decided that perhaps the boys would best be situated with volunteer families, since the rent for three residences for two or three months was all that we could afford. It all worked out well, in the end – one of the families and the single young man who came to live with us stayed in touch for decades afterwards. They all found jobs, bought homes, built lives as Americans. A mostly happy ending, as these things go.

I must reiterate that all this support, monetary and otherwise, for the refugees that we and other local churches sponsored was the direct responsibility of our various local community groups. There were no grants of money passed on to us by Lutheran Social Services, although a congressional act passed in May, 1975 allocated funds to each of the national refugee assistance organizations based on how many individual refugees signed up to be assisted by them. Those funds amounted to $250 per person, adult and child. That specific sum sticks in my head for a particular reason; at least one of the assistance organizations in 1975 just passed those funds on to individual refugees overseen by their agency as a gift: pin money to help them start new lives. Word got around concerning this generosity, and the father of one of our refugee charges asked us (demanded, really) – why didn’t his family receive $1,000, for himself, wife and two children? We passed the enquiry to Lutheran Social Services and received their answer; their decision was to use the funds granted by Congress to help cover unforeseen and out-of-cycle needs like extensive and expensive medical care needed by some refugees. It was their way of doing things. The complaining refugee father continued demanding what he believed to be his rightful due and eventually changed agencies to get it. We were honestly glad to be rid of him, and rather sorry for his wife, who was sweet and shy and possibly rather embarrassed by her husband’s cash-grab.

When I read about how NGOs like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have since made bank out of getting government funds to resettle refugees and cart migrants all around the country in large groups, I am certain that 1975 was when the corruption of organized charity began. Refugee resettlement became a matter of getting a generous payout from the government, rather than depending on the efforts of small self-organized groups in local communities to help refugee clients settle into the US. Resettlement became a means of fattening on some of that big-government cash; a vital part of the refugee/migrant funding complex. Discuss as you wish.

Live Not By Lies

11. February 2025 · Comments Off on Live Not By Lies · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not

It’s often been observed that many great scientific discoveries, as well as evidence of criminality often begin with someone casually glancing at some kind of anomaly, saying to themselves “Hmmm – that’s odd!” and curiosity drawing them into taking a closer look at the matter. Such was the case when an activist for matters to do with native American tribal identity (these would be the folk who used to be called Indians of the feather variety) was watching a TV interview. The activist was one of those who specialized in unmasking so-called “Pretendians” – those who claim Indian descent for reasons of social advantage or monetary gain. (Yes, looking at you, Senator Elizabeth Warren). Remarks made during the interview, by singer-activist Buffy St. Marie triggered a “Hmm, that’s odd!” reaction. Those remarks concerned St. Marie’s search for her real parents among a Canadian First Nations tribe, and the circumstances under which she was adopted by a white American couple as a baby. “Gee,” thought the activist, “That’s what all the other Pretendians say!”
That may not have been the absolute beginning of the thread-pull which unraveled the tangle of St. Marie’s decades-long claims, but it had the same eventual result.

It must be a horrible and soul-destroying thing to have invested so much of her life and career in a pretense such as that, even as it brought her opportunities and fame. She was and is talented; no denying that, but one does have to wonder if she would have been quite as famous if she remained plain old Beverly Santamaria, a plain old Italian-American girl from upstate New York. It would have seemed like just a small thing at first, a ready temptation to polish one’s image in the press, just to stand out as a little more exotic, a bit more romantic, a bit more authentic in the early years on the 1960s folk scene. Considering again, though – the burden of living a lie, always aware of the media-sharpened sword of Damocles suspended on a thread over one’s head In the end that must be soul-warping; thinking of the additional lies required to perpetuate that pretense over decades.

They say the road down to hell is paved at first with attractive materials. But as involved, elaborate as the pretense eventually became, so must have the gnawing secret fear that perhaps one day, it might all come tumbling down, just as it finally has in the last few months. The Canadian government has revoked the honors bestowed on her. The proof must be iron-clad that she is Beverly Santamaria, and not a Canadian Piapot tribe member adopted by an American couple through curiously untraceable international governmental shenanigans in 1941. It seems, additionally, that her own son has taken a DNA test, as has her surviving sister – and yes, it turns out they are close blood kin. Which completely invalidates the adoption tale. (More background here, in this documentary.)
I think the ugliest aspect of what would have begun as only a little padding of the ethnic resume is how St. Marie treated her own birth family – a family who otherwise might have taken very real pride in having a talented and famous member. About the time that she began appearing on Sesame Street, her brother Alan went briefly public, protesting that she was not Indian, not adopted at all, but born naturally to his parents, and brought up as his blood sister. In response, the already famous and well-established personality unleased her lawyers on him, threatening to smear him publicly as an abuser and child molester. There was no way to defend against such a threat, although it appears that no one else in the immediate family gave any credence to the accusation. There would be no way to prove the accusation false; doing so would be messy, public, protracted and would likely cost Alan Santamaria his career and his good name anyway. So the Santamaria family were terrified into silence after that, a silence which continued until recently.

What an ugly, spiteful way to treat your family – because they could and would have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that your public persona was a complete lie. Comment as you wish.

The Handcart Saga

07. February 2025 · Comments Off on The Handcart Saga · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Old West

Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far west – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the mid-west to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.

The epic of the handcart companies followed on the initial founding of Salt Lake City, and the various other settlements in Utah Territory – a stretch of wilderness between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, first encountered in 1846 by early travelers to California following a new route established by would-be explorer Lansford Hastings.
Brigham Young may not have been the dazzlingly charismatic, mesmerizing visionary that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon or LDS church (Latter Day Saints) had been – but his talent for organization and giving scope to the talents of other people with the same set of skills and vision approached the supernatural. There were many off-beat religious movements, sects and idealistic communes in existence in the US in the first half of the 19th century – Millerites, Owenites, Shakers, the Onida and Amana Colonies, various Fourier societies – but the LDS which Brigham Young led was the most successful and longest-lasting of them all; it is still vigorous and growing, unlike most of the other 19th century idealist communities.

During the 1840s and 1850s, wagon train pioneers heading west to California and Oregon usually transported family, goods and required supplies in wagons most often pulled by two or three pairs of draft animals. That was also the means most often utilized in the first decade of emigration by LDS converts and believers to Utah. However, by the mid-1850s straited circumstances and shortages of funds hampered efforts to bring LDS emigrants to Utah, while at the same time an enormous backlog of converts built up in the British Isles and on the continent. Hundreds had come by ship to the east coast, and then by train as far as the mid-west – but then, how would they make the last 1,300 miles? Brigham Young conceived the notion of light two-wheeled carts, pulled by the converts themselves on the last leg between the railhead at Iowa City and Salt Lake City. Each cart company would be accompanied by a few regular wagons, carrying supplies, bedding and tents. And most wagon-train emigrants in earlier years had walked much of the trail anyway … so there was a cheaper solution for LDS believers, eager to get to their Zion.

So potent was the desire to bring these converts to Utah, matched by the organizing skills of the leadership, that it was accomplished. Not without some hardship and the usual setbacks, but three companies, for a total of 800 souls departed on their long journey in the summer of 1856. They were all shepherded by experienced teamsters, or returning LDS missionaries, all on foot and pulling their few possessions in carts (four or five persons to a cart was the estimation). Unfortunately, two more handcart parties, the Willie and Martin companies (so called for their leaders, James Willie and Edward Martin) departed in mid- or late August … against advice, and too late in the year to make it to Salt Lake City before winter set in. There were about a thousand men, women and children in the two groups, most being recent immigrants, unaccustomed to the frontier, and scantily equipped for bad weather.

A cascade of miscalculations by the various authorities at either end of the trail, bad decisions by leaders in the companies, and misfortune along the trail resulted in nine hundred men, women, children and babies becoming stranded by winter near present-day Caspar, Wyoming. One company lost the draft animals to pull their supply wagons to a stampede of buffalo. They had to lighten their carts – of heavy clothing and bedding that might have provided more shelter against winter … when winter then closed down on them. They were cold, starving, sickened and worn down by exposure to the elements and the hardships of walking and pulling the carts. A survivor later wrote that fathers pulled the carts with their small children on them, right up until the day before they died.

There was one fortunate aspect to this purgatory of cold and misery – rescue was on the way. A fast-moving small party of LDS missionaries returning to Salt Lake City had overtaken the two lagging parties. They arrived in Salt Lake City early in October, and informed LDS leaders that there were two more large parties still on the trail. Brigham Young and his leadership council were sensible men – and were horrified to receive this intelligence. They could look at the calendar and read a map. Volunteers for a rescue party were called for at once, and dispatched east along the trail. The Willie company was found first, camped on the Sweetwater River near South Pass. Half the rescue party stayed with them, while the other half pushed on to find the Martin company, a hundred miles farther east. The surviving members of that company had eaten nearly the last of their meagre rations, were exhausted, sick and starving, many of them crippled by frostbite. It was a tale of suffering with a toll of casualties only second to the Donner-Reed party, but without the gruesome element of cannibalism. At least 200 of the Willie and Martin companies died and were buried in mass graves along the way. Only an equally heroic rescue effort kept the toll from being even higher. It seems that most survivors rose above their suffering, viewing it later as a test of their faith and dedication. While only about 3,000 LDS converts journeyed to Salt Lake City in handcart companies before the arrival of the railway made that means of travel redundant, the experience of the handcart companies remains, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of LDS Iliad.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
John Newton – Amazing Grace

Considering Media Teflon

28. January 2025 · Comments Off on Considering Media Teflon · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,All they will call you will be “deportees“

Oh, pity the poor establishment media folks, the woke clergy, and the professional bleeding heart progressive activists, all making woeful faces and lamenting regarding the round-up and repatriation of masses of criminal illegal immigrants. It’s as if they all honestly believe that the masses of illegals are all doe-eyed innocent widdle cheeeldren and humble suffering agricultural workers, all packed off by their cheating employers once the harvest season is finished. The bubble in which these sentiments are enshrined as gospel is being severely battered over this last week as it becomes apparent that many, many Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and incomes welcome the ICE roundups and deportations with cheers of rapturous approval. Imagine that.

See, it looks like the various prog bubble-dwellers could burnish their luxury beliefs without feeling in the least inconvenienced by the realities posed by mass quantities of illegal immigrants, especially those who compounded their illegal status by piling additional criminal behavior on top. Not just sex-trafficking, murder, rape, robbery, and drug-dealing, but identity-theft, driving without a license, insurance, or knowledge of traffic laws, and defrauding social services. Swamping working-class neighborhoods, overburdening schools and health-care facilities to the point of being untenable, depressing wages for lower-end unskilled work, bringing in diseases that hadn’t been current in the US for decades. Ordinary folk in working-class neighborhoods were catching the brunt of all this. To a lesser extent, so were those paying for auto insurance, especially in cities and states where, if you were T-boned at an intersection by a driver running a red light you could count yourself extremely fortunate if that other driver were sober, licensed and fully insured, or best two out of three.

I’d guess that the rapturous approval of the deportations this week is precisely because those being frog-marched onto the big airplane are the criminal scum of the scummiest, whose absence from these shores absolutely no one will miss, save for perhaps their addict customers, their fence for stolen goods and maybe an addled activist, and whatever NGO was paid for bringing them here in the first place. The addled activists are lamenting that practically everyone else is deeply unsympathetic to their laments, and demanding of decent folk that they collude in sheltering the illegals … as if they really were the poor widdle cheeeldren and downdrodden field workers …. Instead of being the criminal scum of the earth. Good luck with that line of reasoning. Really. Good luck, because you’ll need it.
I’d also guess from the lightning-speed at which local law enforcement, ICE, and the Boarder Patrol dropped on the various criminal scum that a lot of people in law and border enforcement had, like Koko the Lord High Executioner, their little lists of those who wouldn’t be missed. Very accurate little lists, of who, and when and where they could be most expeditiously found.
I suppose that once the stock of illegal alien criminals is drawn down, they will start on the illegal widdle cheeldren and the field workers – but by that point, perhaps they will have already self-deported.

On another aspect of the Trump administration, one week and a day in – I am also hugely amused at the Teflon aspects of J.D. Vance, as his vice president. Our establishment media has become so accustomed to Republican political operators who never bite back, or who tended to snivel like third-graders giving up their lunch money to playground bullies, that they seem quite discombobulated by J.D., who wasn’t even much a Trump fan at the first. The usual media crew can’t sanctimoniously score off him as a child of privilege, giving his hard-scrabble rust-country background. Can’t call him a raaaaacist, as he is married to a woman who is very obviously Indian. Can’t sneer at him for having studied at a no-name university, the way they sneered at Sarah Palin. All that – and he gives as good or better than he gets. There was a comment this morning on an Instapundit comment thread which pretty much sums it up: With JD, the Sunday shows are like shooting fish in a barrel. Not much of a challenge for him, but entertaining nonetheless. 🙂
Comment as you wish.

Rare and Fine Books

22. January 2025 · Comments Off on Rare and Fine Books · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Geekery, Local

(A break today from matters political.)

Some time ago – as things are counted in internet time, which is sort of like dog years in that before the turn of this last century was pre-history, 2000 was kind of like AD 1, making the first decade analogous to the Roman Era. Anyway, along about the early Dark Ages-Internet Time, I became a partner in a Teeny Publishing Bidness, run by a woman who was the hardest-driving editor in the local literary arts community. We used to joke that Alice G. had been married three times, twice to mere mortal men, and once to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was also enduringly faithful to observing the Oxford Comma. Because of her serious night owl habit, she preferred self-employment, mainly as a freelance editor and owner/proprietor of the Teeny Publishing Bidness.

A mutual friend who saw to her basic computer needs, was also my sometime employer. In a mad stroke of business/matchmaking genius, he believed Alice and I would be an excellent professional fit … and so, it turned out to be. Among other things, our clients could contact us directly, any time of the day or night. Alice took me on as a junior partner, we shared the work, split the profits and got along very well in that partnership for five or six years. Alice had connections among the mildly well-to do and artistic in San Antonio and for almost thirty years had done quite well out of doing bespoke and high-quality books for businesses, institutions, and for local writers who had sufficient income to support an extensive print run through a lithographic press.

Digital printing and POD became a thing shortly after we became partners, and I set up an account with Lightning Source to serve clients who didn’t have the wherewithal to pay north of $15,000 for Alice’s schedule of services but still wanted to get their book out through Amazon and other on-line markets. I predicted accurately that such clients would soon become very thin on the ground, given the rise of digital printing and competition from existing POD publishers. We could not perhaps, supply such an elegant and high-end volumes as had become her standard through that subsidiary imprint – but we could work with clients who wanted the same high degree of editing, lay-out and covers, as well as distribution through Ingram.

Alice developed a cancerous node on her lung around 2013 and was not able to put much work into the business after that. With the agreement of her family, none of whom were interested in maintaining the Teeny Publishing Bidness, I bought her out: business, client list, contacts, files and all. Many of the remaining clients were touchingly grateful that someone was there to carry on with the firm. It has since developed that many of our older books, especially the ones dealing with local history are in demand … and command quite high prices on the rare book market. They were originally printed in limited quantities – perhaps a couple of thousand in one go – and while we kept a copy or two for record purposes, the rest of the print runs were turned over to the client for private distribution. I wish that we kept at least half a dozen copies of some books, as they presently command at least three-figure prices on the rare book market, if they can be found at all.

I field an occasional call from researchers and historians searching for a copy of one of our limited-run books. Our original authors (many of whom have, like Alice, passed away) did a lot of basic grunt work in researching local history, a mildly famous ancestor or an event, The late Fred McKenzie, who exhaustively researched local histories around Avinger and Hickory Hill, Cass County, Texas – at least has his books available on Amazon through second-hand dealers. I’ve fielded quite a few calls looking for copies from people researching their families, the place they live in, or a business that their family used to own in that part of Texas. I had no luck when a woman called, looking for a copy of this book for sale at any price. Best I could do was to find a nearby library which had a copy, and tell her to ask for it by interlibrary loan.

In the case of this biography, of a woman who was one of the dozen nurses evacuated by submarine from Corregidor before it surrendered to the Japanese in 1942, more copies are in existence; a naval commemorative group did several editions, which were widely distributed. Army nurse Lucy Wilson was barely a hundred pounds dripping wet at the start of the war; she lost twenty-five pounds in the few months of the American retreat. The chief nurse responsible for selecting the handful of women to be evacuated chose those who she feared would not survive captivity for very long, because of their physical or mental condition. Lucy Wilson likely was one of the first on her list. She later qualified as a flight nurse and returned to serve in the South Pacific before the war ended. I used it myself as a reference for my own WWII novel, My Dear Cousin. But no one can locate the current whereabouts of any of Lucy Wilson Jopling’s descendants, who hold the original rights – so no further editions.

Some of our authors wrote a memoir of events which later turned out to be of interest to higher-level researchers and historians. As participants or witnesses to events, they provide sources which are pure, original, unsullied gold to an academic researcher. In his youth during WWII, the author of this memoir was a transport pilot who flew transport aircraft over the hazardous “Hump”. Decades later, he wrote up a rollicking account of his adventures in that theater, and had six copies typed out by his secretary, one for each of his children. His youngest daughter came to us another decade and a half later with her copy and some other relics of his service, including his ration card for a month in late 1943, documenting that he had maxed out his beer allotment, but only used a single bar of soap. The daughter had us do a limited publication, for friends and family for Christmas gifts. Much, much later, a historian called me, looking for a copy of it – I have no idea how he even found the title, as the only place that even lists it is our website, and the Bowker, Inc. data base. Sometimes I can help by sending them in the direction of the author or client, who holds the rights to the book as well as any remaining copies. In this case, I could provide him with the name and last known address of the daughter.

This only applies for a handful of our older and rarer books, though. With the inprint to do publish on demand books, for those authors who have chosen to get their books available for distribution and available, say on Amazon, there is no such thing now as a limited quantity available, and a hard search to find them. Anyone who wants one of those later books can find it readily and easily, without going to the trouble of turning every used book store and rare book website upside down.

And that is my break and yours, from matters political this week. Comment as you wish, on rare books that you wish you had, or kept copies of, knowing now how much they might be worth.

The Fire Next Time

15. January 2025 · Comments Off on The Fire Next Time · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, Politics, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.

So we lived in the hills as soon as Mom and Dad could afford a mortgage rather than rent, kept the brush around the various houses trimmed, the garden well-watered, had a mental list of the precious and irreplaceable items to be grabbed and taken with us in case of a sudden fire evacuation. (In the end, in spite of all care and precautions taken, Mom and Dad’s retirement house in northern San Diego County burned in the 2003 fires, destroying any number of inherited family relics.)I have never forgotten the peculiar odor of smoke from a big burn hanging in the air, the odd beige-orange color of the sky, how the smoke from a distant brushfire piles up in sullen beige clouds, and the peculiar deep roaring sound of a fire well under way. One night in the week of Thanksgiving 1975, we watched the Mill fire burning downhill towards Sunland, Tujunga and La Crescenta. Through Dad’s binoculars, we saw a fire tornado sucking flying debris into itself, while a line of advancing flames stretched as far to the east and west as we could see. Fire engine sirens wailed almost constantly, near and far that night, along the streets below us.

The LAFD were able to beat out that massive fire in the Angeles National Forest within three days or so. But that was then … this is now, and half a century later. Managerial competence in governance and administration appears to have departed California, right along with that portion of a middle and working class who despair of ever getting ahead of the game. So many essential blocks have been pulled out of the jenga tower that was California, through political expediency and mismanagement. The infrastructure of lines and hydrants neglected. Reservoirs and dams were not filled with a particularly generous snow-melt and routed where it would be needed when the fires came; instead, precious water was allowed to pour unhindered into the ocean. Fire breaks and roads were not maintained, preventive burns not done, because environmental activists within and outside the state government have made it nearly impossible. Insurance companies, upon seeing the writing on the wall and knowing that catastrophic fires were inevitable, flatly declined to provide coverage to homeowners. The LAFD fired essential personnel for refusing the Covid shot, deferred equipment maintenance, appeared to prioritize celebrating gay and transgender rather than focusing on fire prevention. In the final insult, the LA FD had their budget cut by the mayor’s office. The mayor herself seems to be one of those who revels in the rewards of the office and those ceremonial honors attached but has little appetite or ability for attending to essentials of civic management.

So all those jenga blocks had been pulled out, when the fires started burning after the Santa Ana winds began to blow. It matters very little if those fires were started by any deliberate or random accident, as they always will in California. Anything and everything will spark off a fire: a discarded cigarette butt, a short in a power line or a string of Christmas lights, a steel bulldozer striking a flint rock, sunlight focusing through a piece of broken glass, a campfire not entirely extinguished, a hot catalytic converter on a car parking in long dry grass … accident or arson.
The hills will burn.
This time, they have burned out the wealthy and well-situated. (Again – like the 1961 Bel-Air fire did.) To a large degree, those in Malibu, along the coast, and in the Pacific Palisades generally appear to be people who were perfectly OK with the initial extraction of the jenga blocks which permitted their secure and privileged lives. Until the fires came over the hillside. (The Eaton fire simultaneously burned out whole neighborhoods in Altadena. This didn’t seem to get half the breathless coverage in the mainstream establish media, mostly because it’s a middle-class to working class neighborhood, with many residents who have lived there for generations, and whose small urban single-family cottages will not be as readily replaced.)

Some commenters speculate that the fires this time will lead to a conservative reawakening in California. A nice thought, but I rather doubt it. Even with the various mismanagement of things in California … it’s still very pleasant for those who have a comfortable income, have lived there all their lives and distain the thought of living anywhere else. The climate is mild year-round, compared to most other places, the range of scenery is glorious, and there still are some cultural advantages. A handful of counties back of the coastal zone and outside of the big cities are still well-managed and sane.
I think it more likely that what will happen as a result of the fires will be a west-coast Curley effect. The electorate will be shaped as the long-time mayor of Boston did, driving out those most inclined to vote against progressive policies. Those who can see the writing on the wall are leaving and will leave with all speed, and perhaps the speed will increase after this disaster. The Californians left behind probably won’t vote for Karen “The Commie” Bass, Governor Brylcreem or their ilk. It’s even more likely that they’ll pull the lever for another even worse Dem next time around and probably one even more incompetent. Whoever the next generation of California politicians and managers will be – it’s a guarantee that their progressive credentials and their chosen pronouns will be perfect. Comment as you wish.

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