The Daily Brief

So the anti-ICE, pro-illegal immigrant antics continue in the state of Minnesota, a place which historically appeared to the rest of us as a place where the people were generally bland, socially conservative, hardworking Scandinavian-American midwestern types, fond of mayonnaise as a spicy condiment. Alas for those dear, innocent days of Minnesota Nice, when one could assume (with some degree of accuracy) that Garrison Keiller’s Lake Woebegon was a fairly accurate reflection. But since the appearance of Tampon Tim Walz and the legendary Somali ‘Learing Center’, that wholesome image has gone down in flames, bigly. When I posted this satiric music video to my social media this week, a regular commenter lamented that now he was embarrassed to even admit that he had been raised in Minnesota, (Tell me about it – during my entire hitch in the military, I had to live down being from California; where everyone was assumed to be a whacko nutcase like Shirley McClain or a bumbling character from the comic novel Serial.)

Anyway, heaping irony on top of a pyramid of insurrection, idiocy, and general flim-flamery, now the dedicated anti-ICEists in Minneapolis and elsewhere are setting up blockages and checkpoints, demanding to see an ID, a reason for the driver of the vehicle to be in that neighborhood, and running an inquiry on the vehicle license plates. The irony of this as a protest against our national authority doing precisely this at the national border and deporting those foreigners who do not pass muster … is an irony so peculiarly dense as to drop through the core of the earth and come out on the far side. Progressives … not exactly known for logic and consistence, are they?
It was also in the news that the two agents responsible for shooting anti-ICE protester Alex Pretti (who does seem to have been a piece of work with a vicious temper) are Hispanic – which has given a massive case of butt-hurt to those sympathetic to the anti-ICE effort, and whom are therefore all about securing the safety and freedom of immigrant gangsters, sex offenders, human traffickers, drug-dealers, and thieves of identity and other valuables to go freely about their illicit business in the US.

It appears to have not occurred to them that – A: many long-time populations of very patriotic Hispanic-Americans have been settled in Texas, New Mexico, California (and other places) since before there ever was a United States and have very little in common with (for example) gangbangers from El Salvador or human traffickers from present-day Mexico, B: might also be considerably annoyed and feeling like chumps if they have gone to the trouble and expense of immigrating legally, and C: be mightily annoyed over having their own communities overrun by and predated upon by the gangbangers, traffickers and thieves from south of ye-olde-border. (I have made this point in several previous posts and comments. Those populations most pissed-off about being overrun by illegals are those most directly and personally adversely affected … and aren’t likely to have been awarded any Grammys recently.)
So, circling back to the matter of Minnesota Nice … I guess that if you can’t be a shining model to be emulated, you can be a grim warning of what not to do. Comment as you wish.

“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.” –An aphorism of Bion of Borysthenes, sometimes attributed to Plutarch

This week we have been treated to the spectacle of progressives throwing a performative tantrums more or less as an outdoor winter sport, only have it abruptly demonstrated in Minneapolis that those who are the uncooperative targets of that tantrum/demonstration/mau-mauing/thrown rocks/speeding SUVs have a genuine and well-placed fear of dying in earnest. Yeah, when the frogs are unhappy about the prospect of dying in service to someone elses’ vanity or veniality, blood gets shed for real. (I am old enough to remember that a lot of on-campus mob violence came to a screeching halt after the 1970 Kent State anti-war/anti-ROTC demonstration got out of hand, when the Ohio National Guard responded to rocks, chanted slogans and insults with live ammunition.) This has been demonstrated yet again by a pair of traveling anti-ICE female activists, for those in the audience who may be new to this unfortunate realization. We hope that other activists of the same ilk are now cognizant that what works to best effect when taunting and filming a hapless store clerk working a minimum-wage retail or fast-food job doesn’t quite play out with armed federal law enforcement personnel. One of their happy taunting crew is now pining for the fjords on a cold metal drawer in the morgue.

Too bad, so sad … from what has been said about the silly, self-anointed savior of the illegal migrants, she was supposedly well-trained by other anti-ICE activists, but what one suspects is that in reality, they and their fellow savior-of-the-illegals were being deliberately set up to be martyrs for the sacred cause, to supply the bloody shirt for future waving. I expect that whoever set this little scheme in motion is pleased as punch with the success of it. Tampon Tim Walz. Jacob Frey and other prominent local Dem powers are likely also very pleased with being able to deflect attention from the massive Somali local looting and fraud operations … although they might not be able to avoid hard questions on it for very long.

Setting up Minnesota as a sanctuary for illegal migrants to the US is a gesture, a desperate gesture. I am sure that the Minnesota Nice Dem Political Class will feel all smug and virtuous about embracing the Poor Poor Pitiful Illegal Aliens – the career gangsters, sex offenders of every degree, drug smugglers and dealers, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers and Methodists. Likely their eyes are focused on the benefits for them politically in making civic life for ordinary citizens more uncertain, dangerous, inconvenient, expensive or just plain unaffordable. It’s a benefit and job security for them – ensuring the continuing residence of a collection of violent criminals, lifetime welfare and benefits cheats, especially those who obediently vote as a block for policies that enable the criminality and the cheating to continue (as well as making life for ordinary, high-trusting, law abiding citizens miserable). The rest of us, paying the tax bills that fund all this government-funded generosity have pretty well lost patience and toleration, as I commented on another post here some weeks ago:

I suppose that the exasperating element of the big national establishment media’s instant and unquestioning sympathy for the Poor Poor Pitiful Illegal Alien is that they ARE inside a particularly insulated bubble. Likely the local media sees the carnage and tragedy very clearly – but the word has gone out, and been out for years. Poor Poor Pitiful Illegal Aliens are to be lavished with sympathy and understanding … and the ordinary citizens adversely impacted are just Stupid Bigoted Raaaaacists, who don’t deserve any consideration at all from the Great & The Good in the media and academia.
The trouble is now there are too many ordinary citizens who have been damaged and damaged badly – which damage the established media and academics steadfastly refuse to acknowledge.

So, how are feelings running now, regarding the antics of organized anti-ICE militants? Did their calculated gain-of-victim ploy change anyone’s mind about apprehension and deportation of illegal migrants, criminals and benefits cheats? Discuss as you wish and have insight.

So I see news stories and blog reports linked here and there; worry about the mass detention and expulsion of illegal immigrants in the US is really a matter of concern to the Trump administration generally. This is according to more centrist bloggers and to the usual sources in the National Establishment Media organs (hmm … I nearly typed ‘nastional’, as in ‘nasty’ in that sentence. Must be my subconscious at it again…) That the prospect of body-armored and masked agents of ICE rounding up illegal immigrants and visa-overstayers, bundling them off to a sort of American gulag before returning them to the third-world hell-holes from whence they came is somehow very distressing to most Americans and will result in diminishing support for Trump and all his MAGA works and ways, according to such reports. Well, I suppose that if one is sitting in a very sheltered bubble, well-shielded against certain contingencies of fortune, it might look like that would be the case.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker which my daughter and I spotted, last week on a car ahead of is, in a very upscale suburb in north San Antonio. The sticker read “Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Racists.” On a very new and well-maintained Lexus SUV. In a part of town, where the City of San Antonio bus system had built (at considerable public expense) an elaborate bus station. This bus station was apparently intended to feed commuters from a well-heeled neighborhood by bus into more urban parts, thereby to make a stab at making the city into some green, fifteen-minute commuter city, I guess. Instead, the bus station mainly serves as a transit station, bringing domestic help to their jobs in the well-heeled outer-ring and very posh suburb.

Essentially, the driver of the Lexus with that bumper sticker appears to be OK with maintaining criminal illegals, sex-traffickers, drug dealers, people-smugglers, and identity-thieves in the US as long as they stay in the ickier parts of town, and don’t impinge in any way on her (I presume it was a female driver – it looked like it, from what I could see through the Lexus’ tinted windows) neighborhood or adversely affect her way of life. Nice. Just the week previous, ICE and the local PD busted a Tren de Aragua cell in a part of town that I’d venture to guess the driver of an expensive car would never be caught dead in.

The heart of the matter is that the tide of illegal immigrants in the US is one which likely only washes through those locations which well-meaning people like the driver of that Lexus, the writer of a recent NY Times sob story, or any of their comfortable friends wouldn’t frequent on a bet. It is not their schools, hospitals and workplaces swamped with illegal immigrants who must be catered to. It probably isn’t their school aged offspring exposed to diseases which haven’t commonly been seen by American doctors in eighty or a hundred years. It’s not their neighborhoods being ruined by twenty or thirty illegal immigrants crammed into a single two-bed-one-bath house, their trucking or construction businesses consistently underbid by competitors paying their hired illegal workers cash under the table. They’re not directly affected by crime committed by illegals; crimes often downplayed by local and national news media organs, and civic authorities. It’s not their credit being wrecked by an illegal immigrant fraudulently using a black-market-purchased social security number. They probably are spending a bit more on car insurance, because of accidents caused by uninsured, unlicensed (or fraudulently licensed) drivers, but like the driver of that late-model Lexus, likely they can afford to pay more.

All this has been going on for years, in the places that the comfortably-situated do not know or care about. So of course, massive, coordinated raids by ICE and illegal migrants being arrested and deported en masse is deeply unsettling … but only to them. Everyone else, especially those who have been personally affected – are very pleased with immigration laws being enforced.
Discuss as you wish – have you a personal story to tell about an interaction with an illegal alien?

Since I first began paying attention to the on-line world, I’ve constantly been aware of the free-floating anger out there – anger whose focus has varied over the years. Anyone who has anywhere sensitive internet antenna is also aware, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Conservativish individuals mostly keep the anger pretty restrained, as we tend to be adults, with adult responsibilities who have learned through bitter experience to keep the fury reined in. We think before we act, in accordance with what Napoleon is said to have counseled; never letting the anger rise higher than ones’ chin. We’ll leave the foaming-at-the-mouth insane, violent acting out to wet-behind-the-ears college students who purely don’t know any better (and probably never will, the way that higher education is going), the sexual-deviant freaks of Antifa, angry customers in a fast-food place pissed-off because of a mistaken order, and the screaming hags of The View – both those on camera and those who only watch their tantrums at home.

However, now we have come to recognize that there is also a substantial pool of free-floating anger on the conservativish side – or rather, those who might more usefully be described as conservative by default, because they are young, male, straight and white. Not being an exotic “other”, either racially or sexually – they been pretty much exiled to a kind of mental desert island over the last couple of decades, while being loudly blamed for every imaginable social crime – slavery, imperialism, the offensive male gaze and for all I know, the heartbreak of psoriasis. Being young, uncertain of themselves in an insecure world, tender and readily bruised, many of those young, white, straight males have taken it to heart and withdrawn, and I can’t much blame them for that. It can’t be a ball of laughs, being on the outs and treated with contempt by most mainstream culture outlets as presently exists.

In daring to go out for a drink and chat up an attractive female stranger, in hopes of a date or maybe something more intimate, personal and long-lasting, the poor inexperienced, uncertain young male runs the risk of being treated like a potential rapist, or at the very worst in the long term, as a combination punching bag and limitless ATM. For all of that, the withdrawn young cohort of men – unless they find a way out and make some kind of mental private peace – get scorned and stigmatized as incels, freakishly devoted to gaming, certain social media circles and essentially checking out of involvement, sexual or otherwise.

I was vaguely aware of Charlie Kirk and TPUSA being one of those out there helping young men make sense of the situation and work out a way of living in this unstable modern world. I was very well aware of Jordan Peterson, on a much more elevated level. I really can’t say the same of Nick Fuentes, until the current bruhaha came like a tornado out of nowhere, although perhaps the conditions – like that for a tornado – were all present. Fuentes himself strikes many observers or commenters on the blogs, websites and substackers that I do follow as a deeply angry, deeply disturbing force; a presence which makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck and inspire one to vacate the area at speed. Is Fuentes just a focus and a voice for that young male anger or is he calculatingly hoping to use that anger as a weapon for himself. Is he looking for wider alliances, or just higher visibility by a seemingly sympathetic interview with Tucker Carleson? For real … or just another media psyops?
Discuss as you wish or have particular insight.

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” – Prologue to Romeo & Juliet

Not two houses alike, and the dignity is probably debatable – but certain things struck me on casually reading about the two young men who appear to be rivals as well as political up and comers on the American scene: J.D. Vance and Zohan Mamdani. The first thing was that superficially they look rather similar: young, dark, bearded, energetic and highly charismatic. They are relatively close in age, only six years apart. Both are married, and only once – to women, which in male politicians these days has something of the charm the unusual, although Mamdani only took the marital plunge relatively recently. Both appear to have surfaced relatively recently into national visibility on the political scene – one as a senator and currently as vice president, and the other poised with much anticipatory fanfare (or dread) to gain high municipal office as mayor of a big and very prominent American city.

There the similarities end. In all else, Vance and Mamdani couldn’t be less alike. Vance was born American and nominally Caucasian. This circumstance of birth would normally have the usual lefty commentariat baying about his so-called privilege, save that he managed to overcome the disadvantages of being born into the poorest, most wretchedly dysfunctional, substance-addled rural community imaginable without a Martin Luther King Boulevard in it and put it all out there in a best-selling memoir. He enlisted in the Marines, served honorably – and then went to college. Lest the usual suspects sneer at him for having gone to a no-name public university (like they did with Sarah Palin) – he was bright enough and savvy to get into Yale’s Law School for post-graduate school. (Enable dripping sarcasm mode: It’s one of the elite American schools, don’tcha know. All the best go there, or one of the other approved Ivies. Disable dripping sarcasm mode) By being a Republican, of course he is assumed to be a racist of the most blatant kind – only oops – he married a woman of unmistakably Indian heritage – from India, not one of our own Reservations. In short – the usual accusations of being privileged, uneducated, racist, and out of touch lobbed in the direction of Republican politicians just can’t gain any traction with Vance. This is probably why the establishment proggie commentariat hate his guts. None of their customary slimes get any traction. And he responds with zestful humor, which is another nice change from the normal recent run of GOP politicians who sniveled like a third grader being relieved of their lunch money on a school playground – and left it at that.

Now – Zohan Mamdani, although of genuine India-Indian descent, by way of Africa where his well-to-do parents maintain a luxurious family compound – can legitimately be described as a child of privilege, but dontcha know – he has the right kind of privilege. His mother is a prosperous international filmmaker of notoriously Jew-hating sympathies. His father has been a resident scholar at Columbia – although one with such peculiar notions regarding American history, apparently believing (for example) that Adolph Hitler got the idea for concentration camps for Jews directly from Abraham Lincoln’s consignment of American Indians to reservations. This is a ball of wrong so deeply convoluted that one hardly knows where to begin untangling it. I fear that such perverse historical fantasies may be common currency among the professoriate these days and demonstrate why the utility of higher education is seriously in doubt among MAGA-affiliated Americans.

Anyway, back to the photogenic and attractive young Zohan Mamdani, whose disdain for MAGA-affiliated Americans, Jews, ambitious strivers of any ethnic background or degree of economic success, and those wealthy who aren’t among his donors and supporters appears to know no bounds. So – an international background of privilege and the kind of progressive and race-based activism usually funded by indulgent parents or a family trust fund, untethered by any experience in hardscrabble, minimum-wage-paying reality. It appears that yes, indeed, he will be the next mayor of New York, as adept as he seems to be at saying the appealing things to the voters there. Never mind if such plans as he has shared with the public are anything like achievable. It’s as the senior NCO who was one of my mentors early in my own military service observed – “Sometimes all you can do is let ‘em fall on their sword. Afterwards, if you’re feeling generous, you can pull out the sword, wipe up the blood, and maybe they’ll listen when you ‘splain where they went wrong.”
So – sword is it for New York? Comment as you have insight and observances to share.

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that a ghastly local crime that furthers the progressive narrative will be picked up and blasted across the National Establishment Media organs. We saw it again, and again and again over the last decade or so. If it furthered the narrative with a little creative tweaking and reframing – well, there it was, splashed across the headlines and bannered on all the broadcasts. If an incident of stomach-turning murder, torture and kidnapping countered the narrative by framing the cherished pets of the progressives as the perpetrators? Then, it was just a local criminal matter and undeserving of national media coverage — and look at what that criminal Trump and his stupid MAGA trash are doing or saying now.
But everybody knows.

Everybody knows, having seen the murder – caught entirely on tape, of a tiny, inoffensive young woman, minding her own business on public transportation – having her throat slashed by a hulking, homeless repeat offender of color. For us all – it’s the last straw, and made worse by the National Establishment Media organs attempting to hide or downplay the recording.
Everybody knows, now.

Everybody on the moderate to conservative side of things knows now that the National Establishment Media organs are not in the news business. They are in the business of being the Democrat Party public affairs outreach team, taking down the dictation from the Party apparatchik who also orders the direction of the spin. It’s what we have come to expect from them, after their slobbering worship of Hillery, and Obama, and the firewall protecting an incapable, senile Biden.
That’s how it goes.

That’s also why their readership and viewer numbers are crashing in spectacular fire and flame like the Hindenburg. It’s why random person-in-the-street interviewees are telling Don Lemon to his face what an absolute idiot they think he is. It may come soon enough that the party operatives like Don Lemon won’t even dare risk doing random street interviews, not without a couple of very large and watchful bodyguards, standing just out of camera range, ensuring proper respect to the petty lordlings of the Established Media.
Everybody knows.

And yesterday, it was made absolutely clear to every one of us on the conservative, Constitution-respecting, hard-working, tax-paying and Tea Party-type side of the political spectrum that assassination is a card fully in play with progressives. Take a stand, voice an opinion which does not align in every respect with progressive values (whatever they may be at the moment) and ooops! Your words are somehow violence, and whatever is done to you for having the temerity to say them – well, you deserved it.
Everybody knows.
That’s how it goes.

I took on a few more sewing projects in the last few weeks, and pulled up some videos and movies to watch, as I finished the hand-stitching; attaching buttons, finishing off racking down facings and waistbands. The movie was The Highwaymen, a retelling of the hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the infamous bank and gas-station robbing duo who died in a hailstorm of lead on a Louisiana back country road in the spring of 1934. The duo signally failed at a life of crime. They did not die rich and of old age in a lavish villa in some country with no extradition treaty to the US but did achieve a degree of tawdry celebrity as a glam pair of 20th century mid-west Robin Hoods. Their violent lives and even more violent deaths made all the headlines back then, and a previous movie which glamorized them out of all recognition. Anyway, I liked The Highwaymen when I first watched it (reviewed here) and even more the second time around. A suspenseful story told through intelligent and insightful scriptwriting, humane and sympathetic main characters combined with expert direction, and without a single shred of obvious computer-generated special effects that I could detect. Finally, a spot-on sense of time and place in location shooting. Yes, this is what Texas looks like, and while I am not old enough to remember the Thirties, I am familiar enough with contemporary photos and films to be certain tha’s what it looked like, back then. It’s purely amazing how well – sometimes – that creators of our entertainment content can do such stories.

Well, even if ninety percent of anything in movies, genre fiction, music and TV is absolute crap, according to Sturgeon’s Revelation – but when it comes to movies lately, it seems like it’s more like 99.9%. Which is rather dispiriting to contemplate: where have all the skilled and experienced creators gone, that our pop entertainment warhorses in this country present such a dismal prospect? I wasn’t the first to observe that of the last round of Oscar awards, not only had I not seen any of the nominated movies, but I also hadn’t even heard of them in the first place. I didn’t want to want to watch any of them, either. Life is just too short and time too limited to take a chance on a lecture with visuals.

But the ability to just tell an interesting, engaging story without climbing up onto a current hobby-horse to bore us all sh*tless with a lecture appears to have left the room.

There was a brief internet-media kerfuffle a couple of months ago, regarding a story in one of the entertainment publications, lamenting how the experienced and talented in the biz were being sidelined as pale, male and stale, in favor of handing over writing, show-running, producing and directing to the hip new BIPOC and relatively inexperienced … because … pale, male, stale. So retro, so ugh, so 20th century! Naturally the subsequent crashing and burning of a substantial number of high-profile entertainment franchises on a pyre of audience disinterest had nothing at all to do with handing them over to inexperienced and marginally talented new kids with a pet hobbyhorse to flog … oh, nothing to do with it! Failure at the box office and viewer ratings was the fault of those unsophisticated, unenlightened bigots in the audience letting their bigotry show …

So, watching The Highwaymen again, and marveling at how very, very good it was – well-worth rewatching, I considered again how the able, talented and experienced are sidelined in the service of recruiting and promoting the less-than-able, etc., who are yet of the favored racial or sexual demographic. It reminded me of the current kerfuffle regarding how the supposedly elite American universities have fallen so drastically in the regard in which they are now held, because of the same process; recruiting and accepting the favored ethnic with lower SAT scores and grades while rejecting those with better scores and grades because they are white or Asian. This has been going on since the 1970s – they called it affirmative action, then – and I began to wonder exactly how much this practice has degraded higher education. Routinely and systematically recruiting and promoting on any other basis other than quantifiable merit, ability, talent … has got to degrade the effectiveness of any activity, after a while; our entertainment, educational establishments, the literary world, civic government, news-reporting functions and the military. I have touched on this matter before, but are we now approaching the point where it all collapses into one big ball of useless incompetence? Even with Trump at the helm and putting out fires as fast as he can?
Consider and discuss, as you wish.

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!

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.”

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?

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?