The Calculated Infliction of Misery

11. March 2023 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Home Front, Politics, Stupidity, Technology

The sudden recent fatwa declared by the great and good in the Biden Administration against the less-expensive gas ranges was … really rather curious – and for what purpose? Cooking (and heating) with gas is (or was) relatively cheap, energy-efficient, beloved of cooks for generations. It has the advantage that if you have an older stove, you can still cook with gas in a power outage. I lived for six years in Spain, where both the stove and the flash hot water heater were powered by propane bottles, and a power outage (which occurred regularly) was only a relatively mild inconvenience. I could cook a hot meal, and we could take hot showers. An all-electric home, such as the one I live in now is miserable, to the point of being unlivable, without consistent electric power, as my neighbors and I were swiftly reminded during the Great Texas Snowmagedden, two years ago. And from this story, linked on Instapundit, one can’t help wondering if the geniuses in Biden’s government are demonstrating trying again, with the so-called safety benefits of locking hot-water heater thermostats at 110-120. The ostensible reason given for these two quasi-campaigns is a tender concern for the ‘health and safety’ of the general public and the best of intentions, but the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

I have become convinced in the last few months that the real intent isn’t ‘health and safety’ at all – but the systematic immiseration of everyone but the comfortably ruling class elite. Oh, they didn’t really care much at all and haven’t for the last couple of decades, about the convenience and conditions for the ordinary citizens, except save when they were rolled out by their handlers to make a few remarks to housebroken establishment press representatives, especially at election time when they had to be seen to throw a bone or two in the direction of the electorate, or make the correct sympathetic noises after a natural disaster. It was necessary that they be seen to care … care deeply, just make a shallow pretense of deeply caring. They don’t care, and perhaps have never really cared, beyond making the proper noises in the established media – the credentialed elite in their glass-walled corner offices in the bicoastal ruling class enclaves, and their lushly-paneled and carpeted Congressional office.

But the brutal fact is … they don’t. They don’t give a couple of satisfactory bowel movements about the ordinary electorate, the regular, law-abiding middle and working class out in Flyover Country, the class that pays their modest taxes, runs the business that keep all afloat, volunteer for the military and everything else – and I believe the goal for the elite ruling class now has gone beyond indifference into active malice. They wish to see us impoverished, dirty, miserable, cold and starving, because that makes such obedient servants, of course. A powerless peasant class doesn’t make so many demands on their rulers – and that’s the point at which we may have arrived – not when election results can be called up and organized to give the satisfactory (to the ruling class) result. What need have they of voters then, when the results can be automatically jiggered to give the correct result?

They hate us, mostly because we don’t obediently fall in line, like medieval serfs, tugging our forelocks and saying, “Yes, Sir, Yes, My Lady, whatever you wish, My Lord.” It’s really kind of sad, that the ruling class of a nation should hate the ordinary population so. The Victorians were brutal in their class snobbery – but they didn’t at least hate the ordinary citizens and cheer for their continued immiseration and disenfranchisement.

Comment as you wish, and while we still can.

The Hard “Nope”

28. February 2023 · Comments Off on The Hard “Nope” · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, History, Stupidity, World

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”
It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint. Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

Long Remembered?

23. February 2023 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?

In the last year that we lived in Spain, I came to the knowledge that many very supposedly-well educated people had the most surprising gaps in their general knowledge of things. This realization came sometime in 1991, I think – and since then, evidence of this has mounted into a heap the size of the Matterhorn. But this was the first time that I saw proof of this in someone that I had assumed to be somewhat well-educated. I took a neighbor and her children on an excursion downtown. (I had been assigned to the base there for more than five years, the neighbor and her family were recent arrivals – the father of the family was our newest Protestant chaplain.) I wanted to show them the fascinating and quaint old city heart of Zaragoza; the Cathedral of the Pilar, the ancient cathedral, La Seo, the central plaza with the old palace of the city hall at one end, a stretch of ancient Roman wall at the other, and the 19th century food market with its’ ranges of individual tiny stalls under the iron roof. The children were of an age to appreciate all this, enormously.

There was an art exhibit in the city hall – late medieval and Renaissance mostly, just about all of it was of a religious nature. I was telling kids about the interpreting symbols and motifs in the paintings of saints, scholars and heroes. The evangelists, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were represented by an angel, a lion, an ox and an eagle, a dove in a golden halo meant the Holy Spirit, an iris symbolized the trinity, grapes and wheat sheaves the communion, a skull in the painting of a saint in meditation meant that the subject was St. Jerome, and a wheel for a female saint meant it was St. Catherine. I had grown up attending churches which had elaborate stained windows incorporating versions of this, looking at those windows during long boring sermons. I assumed this was basic cultural knowledge – but it appeared to all be news to the chaplain’s wife. She was listening to what I was telling the kids, with rapt attention; “I didn’t know that!” she exclaimed, and I was a bit boggled. I had assumed that, given her husband’s profession and that she was a college graduate too, that she might have picked up a working knowledge of religious iconography, by osmosis, if nothing else.

At that time it seemed to matter very little; odd bits of knowledge could be out there, like flowers in an endless meadow, and just not appeal to a person wandering along a path with their mind on other things. It is or was all out there – the wandering intellect can gather what they want. Or not. What is becoming frightening now in this awful decade, is the deliberate, wholesale replacement of that wild and random-flowering meadow of intellectual knowledge with a strictly-defined monoculture. Only the approved concepts and interpretations are allowed to grow; all the rest are clear-cut, mown down to the dirt, because… reasons.

Statues and monuments removed, books removed from library shelves and from school curricula, histories censored and the fake (like the 1619 Project) loudly promulgated, researchers, scholars and teachers removed from laboratories and classrooms if they presume to differ from the established new narrative. No more study of the classics of western thought – the ancient Greeks and Romans, the great medieval theologians, those artists and architects of the Renaissance, the great thinkers who worked out details of a revolutionary American experiment in self-government, the generals who fought the wars that defined the western world and the inventers and industrialists who shaped the modern world. Nope, all of them are horrible ‘ists’ of one despicable variety or another, unworthy of the attention of (assume Critical Drinker voice) *THE MODERN AUDIENCE*
What are we doing, what can you suggest, to preserve that intellectual meadow? Preserve hard copy books of cancelled authors and history? Protest public-funded wokery at state-supported universities? Walk away from those corporations like Disney, which are among the worst offenders. Discuss as you wish.

Boerne – The Last Laugh of the Independents

19. February 2023 · Comments Off on Boerne – The Last Laugh of the Independents · Categories: Ain't That America?, Local, Texas, That's Entertainment!, Working In A Salt Mine...

The name of the town, incidentally, is pronounced “Bernie” – it’s one of the small Hill Country towns first established by the German settlers enthusiastically crowding into to Texas by the Adelsverein, and then by the failure of the various 1848 revolutionary movements. It’s rather more wealthy than most such, to judge from the number of very nose-bleedingly-high-end retailers lining Main Street. We hadn’t been up to the town in more than a year, when we visited just before Christmas to have a picture taken of Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson sitting with Santa, and in that time some things have changed – the gas station/meat market/BBQ place on the corner of Main and River Road closed, and the building demolished. It’s now an empty lot. The beautiful Victorian house on Pecan Street which my daughter loved with the intensity of a stalker has changed hands. The new owners apparently cleared away most of the garden and trees, and put up a fence around the yard. A good friend of ours used to manage the Squirrel’s Nest thrift shop, in an old building on Main which benefited a local animal charity, but the shop had to relocate to a less-well-trafficked location because the owner of the property wanted to expand the restaurant next door into that space. The Bear Moon Café seems to have closed their dining room inside their premises. All cause for sadness on our part.

But there were some positive developments, and one of them was discovering a new independent bookstore, at the back of a newish building on Main – a relatively tiny but comfortable place, of two rooms filled with an appealing and well-curated selection of books. The very best part is that they are ready, willing, and eager to stage author events – and so, when I had dropped off my card with the staff, when we discovered the Boerne Bookshop, I heard from them almost at once. We set a date for a Saturday in February – which was yesterday – and it all went very well. Very well, indeed – the Bookshop was frequented by lots of walk-in traffic over the two hours. Not a bit like the last time I did an author signing – sitting at a table in an almost-deserted bookstore, watching people try not to catch your eye. Perhaps I have gotten better at this kind of thing, or the elaborate Edwardian costume with hat and all makes a good ice-breaker for starting conversations. That, and in a small place like the Bookshop it might be considered rude to ignore someone sitting there, with a stack of books at hand. Anyway, enough copies of My Dear Cousin and Adelsverein; The Gathering sold, and I handed out enough of my business cards and flyers about my historical series to have made it worthwhile. I’ll definitely go there to launch the next installment of the historical series – That Fateful Lightning – when I buckle down and get it finished. My daughter noted that the cashier was ringing up sales on a regular basis – including her’s – as she had found four books that she simply had to have, unlike the last two or three times she wandered through a Barnes & Noble outlet; which now seem to be novelty stores, selling toys, magazines and stationary … oh, and a few shelves of books in the back.

It’s a mixed bag for indy authors, dealing with bookstores, large and small, independent bookstore and chains alike. We often lamented this, in the various indy author groups that I have been a part of, over the years. Barnes & Noble were generally hostile, with a few individual exceptions, if they had a manager or an event coordinator who could think outside the box. The local Borders outlets were magnificent to local indy authors; one location here in San Antonio even held a mass indy-author event at Christmas; alas, they went under. Hastings outlets were also nice about hosting author signings, although their focus wasn’t really books, but media generally. It was just very pleasant to have an event at a welcoming store, where there were enough interested people among customers and staff, and I didn’t feel that I had wasted my time for two hours. It’s often said among other indy authors that writing the book itself is just half the job – and the other half is marketing it. It’s also been said often enough that the national chains of big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble drive the small independent bookstores out of business entirely – but looking at independents like the Boerne Bookstore and others like them, who are holding on by getting and staying involved with local readers and writers – the independent little book stores may have the last laugh after all.

Getting Ahead of the Game

12. February 2023 · Comments Off on Getting Ahead of the Game · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

At only five weeks into 2023, it does look as if I am closing in on some of the goals outlined in my end-of-year wrap-up. As for the books in progress, there is only one more story to round out Lone Star Blood. I looked over the four completed, and they strike me as rather grimmer than some of the previous stories in Lone Star Sons and Lone Star Glory – but then, on looking again at those two volumes; eh, they deal with personal treachery, several murders, suicide, political treachery … and escaping to another life, so maybe not all that grim.

That Fateful Lightening still remains half-finished, while I do that last short adventure for Blood.

But as for the household goals, one is done and dusted – the dryer vent. Yes, finally got that one done, although it wound up costing about four times what I thought that it would. Still – the amount of lint scraped out of the vent was enough to line every bird nest for at least half a mile around, and now the dryer completely dries a load in one brief cycle, unless it is one of the heavy cotton blankets which always took forever, anyway. I definitely know that the dryer vent was never cleaned during the time that I owned this house – save for efforts by my daughter and myself with a vacuum-cleaner attachment to suck out lint from the inside of the house. It may not even have been done by the original owners. The tech hired – and who did the job for about four times as much as I was expecting to pay, as none of the other local companies never did me the courtesy of responding to my requests for bid – said that the cap of the vent was firmly nailed into place and looked to him like it had never been shifted at all. Yeah, my mind boggled, at that point. But now that the job is done – we are happy with it. So now the house won’t catch on fire through the accumulation of heated lint in the chimney-vent, which is always a plus.

The second goal is construction of the short fence and gate to make a little private patio and play space in the paved area by the front bedroom – a room that when I had the windows replaced, I asked for and had installed a French door, instead of a double window. The contractor/handy guy/crew came on Friday morning to start work – it’s just a short run of fence, all of 12 feet, but with the gate – it complicates the project a bit, necessitating four postholes, two at either end and two on either side of the planned gate. And the construction crew, which is run by the husband of another realtor who is my daughter’s good buddy at the brokerage – dropped off one single worker to dig the four holes, before heading off to another job. So that one late teenaged worker went to work with a posthole digger and shovel and managed to drill down into the rock-hard caliche layer – which lies about a foot down, after a layer of solid, brick-like-when-dry adobe clay. He finished gouging the required four yard-deep holes after lunchtime, and then sat with his cellphone in the little patio … and then and then …

We messaged the handy-crew boss; Hey, your guy is still here. Gonna come and finish the job or at least collect him?

Reply – yeah, this is what they do. They get paid for the day, if they finish early, they get to slack off.

Us – OK.

But it was getting cold – it really was. And it was getting later and later.

Ok, surely the crew is gonna finish whatever job they are working on at five … six … and the minutes ticked by, and their worker is still there, sitting on the bench in what will be the small patio, absorbed in his cellphone. And it’s getting colder and colder, supposed to get down to near freezing in the wee hours … my daughter finally came out and told him to come inside. His grasp of English turned out to be nearly non-existent, but my daughter found some translation programs, and was in touch with the manager of the firm, did manage to discover that the work crew were coming back from another job, some distance from the city. And this was Friday at rush hour…

I should point out that we didn’t have any apprehensions of doing this; he was barely teenaged, had no visible tats and was wearing paint-splattered clothing, and we have a large and very protective dog as well as divers other means of personal protection. So – we wound up giving the kid supper – since we were both starving anyway and it would be horrendously bad-mannered to eat in front of him and not offer a plate. If the crew hadn’t shown up, I think we might have just given him a blanket and let him sleep on the couch but they did show up to collect him, eventually.

They are supposed to return on Monday to finish the job. Pictures to follow of the completed patio project.

The Last Straw of US

08. February 2023 · Comments Off on The Last Straw of US · Categories: Ain't That America?

Well, that’s it for Disney for now and the predictable future – anything whatsoever to do with a Disney brand anything for this family. Disney-brand movies, Disney-owned media outlets, toys, games and clothing with Disney characters on them, the parks – the whole ball-o-wax. I was pretty certain I was done with them when I wrote this, almost a year ago. (Disney was already circling the drain with me, the year before, when this posted.) This most recent release of theirs has gone beyond offensive wokery, romped through partisan propaganda and plunged headlong into purveying outright lies – lies about American history, which to me, as a passionate reader of history (as well as a scribbler of historical fiction) is a form of blasphemy. Worse than that – a putrid and manipulative lie.

Slavery did not build this country. The ‘peculiar institution’ as it was described in antebellum writings, in fact rather retarded industrial development in the old South. I will concede that extensive production of cash crops as rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton did depend on slavery. Those enterprises enriched a small elite fraction of Southern slaveholders and kept the rest of the south relatively poor, undeveloped, and almost medieval in backwardness, although like the medieval nobility, convinced of their own superiority. Industry, innovation, and immigration all inclined to those places north of the Mason-Dixon line, while the South stagnated, even after Northern victory in the Civil War brought an end to chattel slavery.

I will concede that slave labor did play a part in the construction of certain historic buildings and public developments, and in some industries like Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works. But slaves did not build the Erie Canal, the fabric mills of New England, Samuel Colt’s industrial armory. Black slaves did not create or maintain the telegraph lines which bound the country together, nor did slavery figure in the Santa Fe trail, the Oregon-California trail, the various precious metal rushes which eventually filled up the far west, the Pony Express, the web of stagecoach routes that prefigured the transcontinental rail network, the coal mines and steelworks that dominated industry after the Civil War, the oil industry that eventually powered much of that growth, Thomas Edison’s laboratory and a hundred other manufacturing, mercantile or inventive enterprises … none of that was based on slavery, nor did formerly enslaved people play very much of a part, other than that of employees. To insist, as this wretched cartoon does, that slavery “built” the United States is a pernicious and poisonous lie, a gross distortion.

The Disney company should be deeply ashamed of perpetuating it – I am certain that the late Walt would be. The danger in pushing such a gross misreading of history is that people without much historical knowledge will come to accept them as a fact. It’s a kind of racism every bit as destructive as the distorting fungal infection in the game and series The Last of Us. We have already seen countless instances of black on white or black on oriental violence, via the so-called ‘knock out game’ – or even outright murder in the city streets, such as in this incident. And now the shambling corpse of reparations returns, yet again. If it weren’t for the fact that most of us genuinely judge by the content of character rather then the color of the skin envelope it’s in – I believe that we’d already be in a race war to the knife. It may yet come to that, if Disney and the rest of the so-called anti-racist brigade are super-spreaders have their way. Discuss as you wish.

The Temptation of Dressing My Grandson For Book Events

28. January 2023 · Comments Off on The Temptation of Dressing My Grandson For Book Events · Categories: Domestic

So – I established the practice of wearing late Victorian or Edwardian-style outfit when out doing a book event; everything from a WWI-era grey nurses’ dress with a white apron and kerchief, to a black taffeta bustle skirt and jacked with a blue ribbon sash hung with orders and jewels and a white widow’s bonnet (a la Queen Victoria). It’s an attention-getter in a room full of other authors and readers, and a wonderful social icebreaker/conversation starter: Hi, my name is Celia, I write historical fiction, so I like to dress the part!

I am also helping to raise my grandson, Wee Jamie – and fully intend, when he is just old enough to be a help – to draft him as my assistant, teaching him well the craft of direct sales. We have already carted him along to several market events this last fall, and he was angelically good, quiet and very charming to all – so I have every reason to expect that he will continue in that vein. He will be dressed appropriately, in proper Victorian/Edwardian small boy’s outfit, and I tease my daughter by insisting that I will fit out Wee Jamie in a dark velveteen Little Lord Fauntleroy suit – jacket, knickerbocker trousers, and shirt with a lace collar. We’ll skip the long, curly golden locks. His own hair is light brown and stick straight. I also tease her by telling her that it should be cut in a military high-and tight. (You know – that haircut where it looks like the guy has shaved his head entirely and parked a small furry rodent on top.)

In any case, the black velvet Buster Brown suit was all the rage for little boy’s best outfits in the wake of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s best-selling 1885 novel, subsequently turned into a popular stage play version, and to generations of movies and television series. She based her title character, Cedric Errol, on the charming personality of her younger son, Vivian – who as a small child,  was bold, amiable, socially at ease and given to making endearing remarks to all whom he met. The character Cedric proved to be just as endearing – a sympathetic, well-spoken, and egalitarian lad, who was inclined to use his considerable wealth and rank for innocently charitable purposes; the very beau ideal of the Victorian age. (His metaphorical descendants died in droves, on the Western Front.) He served as the model for the illustrations to the book when it was published – and proved to be as popular as the Harry Potter series, more than a century later. Vivian, as one might surmise, did have some trouble in living the embarrassment of this down, as he grew up … went to college, and married in his turn. He turned out to be a stout guardian of the wealth that his mother had earned through her own work as a writer. Fittingly, he died of a heart attack in his sixties in 1937, through over-exerting himself in the rescue of passengers on a foundered boat.

Well … maybe just a knickerbocker or a sailor suit. Something that doesn’t embarrass Wee Jamie in coming years.

Terf War

25. January 2023 · Comments Off on Terf War · Categories: Fun and Games, Good God, Media Matters Not, Politics

It’s truly become amazing to me, how very vicious the trans war is getting to be; so far, it’s only words, but only words is how unspeakable atrocities begin. And all this is over what is a vanishingly small minority, but which happens to be “the fashionable hot new thing to shock the normies with” among overexposed celebrities, activist academics, and the desperate-seeking-relevancy activists battening onto a cause to give purpose to otherwise empty lives. It’s a trend amplified a hundred times by such advocacy, and then another hundred by the leviathan of social medial; a leviathan before which established corporations and businesses tremble. Candidly, one might have expected titans of commerce (like Target and the Disney company) possessing sufficient market knowledge to stay away from advocating causes which might – just might – piss off a large portion of their customer base. And one might be wrong. Never underestimate the mad urge to be a dedicated follower of fashion, I guess.

But it does seem that old-line feminists are rebelling against the activist goad, or at least, some of them are, when it comes to allowing so-called trans-women (who still have all their essential male parts, including beards and DNA) into what formerly were biological-women-only spaces. Spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, clothing-optional spas, hospital wards, battered woman shelters, and prisons. And of course there is resistance from biological women, since it seems that a fair number of trans-women aren’t anything of the sort; they’re just perverts and predators looking for a well-stocked hunting ground. To the surprise of practically no one, the Wii spa tranny eventually turned out to be a registered sex offender, getting his jollies by flapping his wang-wang at women and girls. The Canadian Yaniv character – allegedly an overweight lesbian – turned out to be an abusive freak addicted to lawfare against women beauticians offering depilation services of truly female private parts. The high school-boy-in-a-dress, sheltered by the local woke-as-heck Virginia school board as some kind of sacred cause, turned out to be a rapist. And the Brits have come to the appalled realization that yes, so-called trans-women transferred to women’s prisons are rapists and abusers relishing their happy hunting ground. Another aspect of so-called patriarchy which the old-line feminists didn’t anticipate – that those in authority would value the supposed mental comfort of a male LARPing as a woman, rather than the actual physical safety and peace of mind of real women.

Time was, when male to female transexuals (and probably the reverse as well) seemed to wish for nothing more than to quietly blend into the background, to live as the sex that they were convinced they were, without fuss and fanfare. The current trans activists trend vastly more confrontational – to the point of ugliness. Why has the matter of transsexuals suddenly blown up to such an extent lately? A matter of fashion? A huge desire to shock the normies? Or bored activists looking for new frontiers? Discuss as you wish.

Public Art and Freedom of Speech…

20. January 2023 · Comments Off on Public Art and Freedom of Speech… · Categories: Ain't That America?, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, sarcasm

… such as they are, in these distressing days. It’s come to be a standout exception in the last half-century when a piece of public art is actually attractive, engaging, relatable to the place and the audience, and exhibits moderate to advanced skills and aesthetic sense on the part of the artist. Noted in Tom Wolfe’s book-long evisceration of modern architecture, altogether too many post-WWII public buildings got finished off with a installing barren plaza in front, a plaza featuring a water feature with an enormous concrete turd dropped into it. There are exceptions to this bleak and ugly trend, of course – but the monumental MLK/Coretta Scott King statue unveiled last weekend in Boston is, alas, not one of them.

It’s just passably OK from the front aspect, but looking at it from the other side … oh, gosh – some bodiless arms holding up an engorged colon, a huge male member, or an enormous turd? Or something even ruder, as was suggested by Leslie Jones. Perhaps the main purpose, after all, was to burn $10 million dollars. And, no – I don’t think the people of Boston will come to love “The Embrace”, as the French eventually embraced the Eiffel Tower, or Christ the Redeemer came to be reverenced by Brazilians. A further note to Ms. Jones – I certainly will criticize that expensive bronze atrocity. You suppose that for another 10 million, the artist could have included the heads?

In the meantime, it seems that Sheila Jackson Lee, the wicked witch of Houston, the most abusive boss on Capitol Hill, and the long-time bane of airline staff on Washington to Houston flights has put forward a bill which basically enables criminal charges against anyone who posts anything on the internet which can be connected to the commission of an actual hate crime. Leaving aside the concept of a ‘hate crime’ being somehow worse than an ordinary, non-hate crime, this bill – in the event that everyone in the House and Senate looses what is left of their damned minds and decides that the First Amendment is merely a polite suggestion – could in theory mean that if someone vandalized the above-noted MLK monument, that I could be charged with contributing to or encouraging a hate crime. In past times, I would have expected that Queen Sheila’s flight of legislative fancy would be laughed out of consideration in about two minutes … but these mad days, I really can’t be sure … Discuss as you wish, and while we still can.

PS – I see in the news that Jacinda Ardern has resigned as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Jumped before she was pushed? Is there some kind of scandal brewing down under, or just the potential humiliation of losing reelection in a landslide. Locking down all of the country for fear of Covid AKA the Commie Crud can’t have done all that much for her popularity, as the very model of a modern Major AWFL. Anyone have insight into local politics in New Zealand?

Wholly Unmodern Cartoons

17. January 2023 · 2 comments · Categories: Critters, Domestic, Geekery, That's Entertainment!

So, Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson is of the age when he likes noisy things, flashing lights, music and moving colors. We have a Tunie (a kind of boom-box for small children) with an assortment of selections – none of them Disney, by the way. I’m boycotting Disney for now and for the foreseeable future. He has a couple of walkers, and noisy educational toys, toys that jingle, rattle, and play music. And we do let him sit up in the den and watch cartoons. Shaun the Sheep was a favorite, and then a French production – Grizzy and the Lemmings, which features a grizzly bear plagued by a troop of mischievous lemmings. Both Shaun and Grizzy feature wordless adventures, and lots of physical gags.  But the very favorite seems to be Masha and the Bear – a Russian series in various translations for the international market, the adventures of a mischievous and hyperactive little girl and her best buddy, a retired circus bear. There are all sorts of Russian cultural references, most of which I am certain that I am not catching. I do get the classical music references, but the one about the characters of two wolves who live in a decrepit ambulance and are called on for medical and rescue assistance had to be explained through the Wikipedia entry. It’s a Russian proverb, that the wolves are the orderlies of the forest. It’s a cute series, and one of the best things about it is that there isn’t a rainbow in sight. Not a single reference to current woke fads, diversity, or anything more significant than ‘Be careful you don’t get in over your head, child!’ Just gentle and amusing antics of a little girl and her best bear friend, at home and in the forest.

Between this and Grizzy, though – some day we will have to break it to Wee Jamie that bears (and wolves, too) are wild creatures, and not really given to play nicely with small children. I am hoping that he will not be too terribly disappointed.

The Royal Ruckus

11. January 2023 · Comments Off on The Royal Ruckus · Categories: Fun and Games, Geekery, General, Media Matters Not, That's Entertainment!

Although ruckus is perhaps too mild a term for the flaming dumpster fire, train wreck or thirty-car pile-up on the interstate, for the public relations disaster that has been called down upon the Windsor family by the present king’s younger son. One isn’t so much drawn to look, in horror – just that one can’t look away from the international spectacle of a man napalming relationships with his own family, all egged on by his wife and the news/entertainment media.

I can’t help knowing what I do know about the British royal family, and the Kardashians, too, as I am a regular reader of the Daily Mail. Curiously, both the British royals and the Kardashians are an obsession of that publication, and it’s a slow week where there aren’t half a dozen stories concerning either. To be fair, I would guess that most of the royals are a bit better grounded, more obedient to duty, and all-around pleasanter people than the Kardashian clan. I really don’t know any of them, in the accepted sense – all I do know, like Will Rogers, is what I read in the papers. But the royals figured a lot in the news, over the last twenty or forty years – what with Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee, the assorted family weddings, divorces, scandals, nostalgic looks backward at the abdication of Edward, the wartime conduct of Queen Elizabeth’s parents, her own coronation, and her recent passing … well, one picks up a lot of trivial knowledge by osmosis.

One of those things is the realization that it’s a burden enough to be born into a family such as the Windsors, and as for the individuals who willingly and for love marry into it? It’s not a fairy tale; it’s more like an indeterminant sentence of glittering privilege and hard labor, into which those volunteers must go with open eyes and a willingness to fit into that life and give up just about every shred of privacy as the rest of us know it. The late Queen Mother did so, apparently assuming at the onset that her husband as the second son would be allowed a relatively obscure and private life on the edge of the royal circle. (I have read in several different accounts that her resentment of Edward VIII was unrelenting, as she was convinced that the responsibility of the office her husband was thrown into, willy-nilly, contributed to shortening his life.) As queen consort and later dowager, she never put a foot wrong. Catherine Middleton did the same; it would seem that Prince William let her have a good long time to consider and consent to what she was letting herself in for. Camilla, the present queen consort was in two minds about the degree of commitment necessary to join the royal family firm; apparently, so did Prince Harry’s previous serious girlfriends, and who could blame them in the least?

Another of those realizations is the knowledge that their lives are terribly peculiar; privileged for certain – but always in the pitiless and unsparing eye of the public – always “on”, whenever in public, the cynosure of all attention. The lifelong burden of attention and responsibility must be a terrible weight; only the strongest and most dedicated are likely able to hold up under the strain without cracking. That the late Queen and her husband held up under it for decades argues for the strength of their own characters, and the steadfast support and affection of a close family circle and those long-time members of their private circle – those few with whom they can relax, let their hair down, metaphorically, and trust to share confidences with – confidences and feelings which will not immediately be blared to the public at large. A close-knit and close-mouth family circle must be a large part of that support system. And Prince Harry has just blown all of that to heck. Not just breaking family confidence, as if that weren’t enough, but publicly venting a reservoir of spleen and resentment with just about every member of his family. It’s horrifying to watch as a disinterested spectator. Those once closest to him must be in agony. One must wonder if he was always an immature and resentful dumpster fire of a human being, and the royal public affairs office and a sympathetic British media just managed to keep that under wraps … or was Ms Markle every bit as awful.

If anything, the divorce coming along in five to seven years, is going to be an even more disastrous spectacle.

Wee Jamie

04. January 2023 · Comments Off on Wee Jamie · Categories: Domestic, General

My grandson, commonly called Wee Jamie in these pages, is twenty months old now, and a week ago Sunday experienced his second Christmas. Possibly this is a Christmas which will establish his memories of the holiday; what with presents, visiting Santa, the decorated Christmas tree and all the lights, nutcrackers, Santa figurines, the creche and the garlands over the door and the mantlepiece. It depends on how early his conscious memory kicks in, which is extremely variable. (I can remember very clearly places and incidents from when I was just barely three, my daughter says that her memory is a blur until nearly four.) Maybe next year will be the one that he remembers as being supremely enchanted, the Christmas which sets the standard for all the happy Christmases in the rest of his life. For myself, having at least sixty of those Christmases in memory under my belt, the only ones which really stand out for me now are the ones that broke the mold – those Christmases celebrated in basic training, a couple of them in Japan, the one in Greenland, the Christmas in Korea – all those holidays wherein we exiled souls made our own celebrations. The family Christmases all have settled into one indistinct blur; a pleasant blur, anyway.

Jamie is … adorable. Not my own opinion as a fond Nana; he is adorable. He is outgoing and friendly to almost every stranger that he meets, and affectionate to those whom he knows – our close neighbors, his godparents and our own friends, mostly. I have always thought this to be a better trait in a toddler, rather than being fretful and fearful of any other adult outside a limited circle.  Adorable in my arms, sodden with sleep, draped limp and boneless against my shoulder when he has fallen asleep, ready for nap or the night. He is a handsome little boy with feathery light-brown hair flopping over a high forehead. I am certain that by early middle age he will have a rapidly receding hairline, rather like Prince William in that respect. His eyes are, alas, an indeterminant hazel-gray-brown, rather than the blue they were as a newborn. He does retain the strongly marked eyebrows and long eyelashes which were noted even in the pre-natal scans. According to his last pediatric visit, he is trending physically on the smaller side of normal for his age. My daughter and I are both certain that sometime in his early teens he will shoot up overnight and become a tall and lanky adult. He is a very well-behaved baby, not much given to spasms of frustrated crying – and that on occasions when he was very tired, very hungry and it was past his regular naptime. This is good – as it distresses my daughter enormously when they do happen. The last three times were when we were in the car, coming back from some place, and Wee Jamie was frustrated and inconsolable.

It was feared, early on and based mostly on my daughters’ age, that there was a risk of Down’s Syndrome for him. This concern haunted her pregnancy, especially as there were some early indications on ultrasound scans which hinted at that condition – mostly a thickened nuchal fold at the back of his neck. There were some small cardiac issues detected at birth, and his eyes were slightly almond-shaped, which turned out to be more of a family trait. But he had none of the other notable physical markers for Downs, and the cardiac issues resolved within a year. The one worrisome quality was and is that he is slow to develop.  Wee Jamie has been late hitting all those important benchmarks; anywhere from two to three months behind in rolling over, sitting unaided, high-crawling, cutting teeth and saying distinguishable words. The pediatrician, being concerned that he might fall too far behind and never catch up, recommended physical and speech therapy through Brighton Center. He is making progress, to the point where the therapist – wise in the ways of small children says that Jamie could walk, stand, feed himself with fingers or a spoon … but he just doesn’t want to. I suspect that he has always been a bit lazy – breast-feeding was too much work for him early on, and he preferred the ease of the bottle.  He still isn’t saying simple words, or following many simple instructions, but by no means is he inarticulate; no, he is quite chatty in baby-babble. After watching the animated series Grizzy and the Lemmings, and Masha and the Bear, will do a very creditable bear-growl. Again, I suspect that he might not talk until very late, at which time he will surprise us all by speaking in complete, grammatically correct sentences. No, thank you, Mother, I do not require another helping of mashed peas at this time.

I can hardly wait to see how he turns out, this wonderful little boy-child. My daughter had a dream of him, once, of Wee Jamie being commissioned a captain in the military medical field, with us pinning the insignia on his shoulders. She said wistfully that she wished she could have shared the dream with me, so that I could see how handsome he had turned out to be. And a doctor in the family, too. Dad would have been so proud of that!

House

30. December 2022 · Comments Off on House · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General Nonsense, Home Front, Local, Texas, Veteran's Affairs

As my daughter has taken up a new career (one which she is thoroughly enjoying, now that she has a successful sale under her belt and another three or four potentially serious and committed buyers on the horizon in the coming new year) I have had, perforce, to take an interest in the market for houses, in this, a moderately prosperous Texas city. Well, moderately prosperous, in spite of all the (explicative deleted) that the current economy and the Biden administration can throw at us. By all evidence that my daughter has noted locally, (mostly in price reductions for a number of listings) the property bubble has well and truly burst, or is now in a mode of slow deflation. Conventional wisdom among realtors who have been in it for years, is that prices for houses are on a seven-year-long boom and bust cycle. We’re about to head into the ‘bust’ downslope. Anyone who does have the wherewithal – the bulging pocketbook to buy outright or a high-enough credit rating qualifying for a loan at favorable rates to buy a house in the next couple of years will have their pick of properties, at least in this part of Texas.

I have noted over more than two decades of living in it, is that my own neighborhood is quietly prosperous; a high percentage of homeowners and few rental properties. This is a good thing, most definitely not a class or racial issue. It should be obvious to all now that owners of a house, even if only a small one, will tend to take better care of the roof, walls, windows and HVAC system that they have invested in. I would guess that my neighborhood very closely reflects the national racial makeup; racially mixed in conformance with the overall national stats. (Not culturally mixed, though. Just about all my neighbors are house-proud, responsible and community minded.) My neighborhood is not one of the notoriously wealthiest neighborhoods in San Antonio; the houses are relatively small, in the 1,000-1.500 square foot range on small lots, not more than a 10th of an acre. Some of the larger houses in the older part are on lots a bit larger than that, but all in all, the subdivision is a comfortable fit for people with working-class jobs, convenient to the various military bases, shopping centers, highway access. These small, comfortable houses and manageable gardens are owned by a cross-section of retired military, ordinary retirees, new families, small families, single working women, and small business owners. Working bourgeoise; the kind that the New Woke World Order wants to squeeze out of existence, for our stubborn insistence on managing our own lives and economics without any interference from the new self-elected and lustful-for-power Ruling Class.

As an aside, I don’t think that will happen – all of us stubborn working bourgeoise reduced to rental serfdom, subject to the illogical whims of some ivory-tower and unaccountable bureaucracy. There are, as yet, too many ways for ordinary citizens to slip away from the grasping fingers of control.

An element that my daughter has noticed is that the smaller houses in solid neighborhoods like ours go like hotcakes. The 1,000-1,3000 sf home, two bed, one bath, or bath and a half – such small starter or retirement homes at a reasonable valuation are in great demand, demonstrated by how blazingly-fast they sell, once they are listed. Not all that surprising, actually, as that is the size that I could readily afford, house hunting at the end of my inglorious military career. Also about the size of what my own parents could afford and which we all lived in as a family of six: two or three bedrooms and a single bath for us all. But such smaller homes coming on the market are few and far between and looking at the new developments spring up around the parts of San Antonio that I frequent, the new builds seem to be at the upper end of that range or larger, even way, way much larger. What about the prospect of smaller homes, homes even under 1,000 square feet, tinier lots?

You might think that the current fashion for “tiny homes” should be appealing to developers, just as a matter of marketing, and the lower costs to build and thereafter maintain … but for some reason, it doesn’t. Builders go on merrily constructing bigger and bigger houses.  (Usually on smaller and smaller lots…) I have always wondered why. The usual explanation is that municipalities naturally want to collect the very most in property taxes – the larger and more lavishly-adorned the property the greater the tax assessed, and the existing homeowners in the area being considered invariably hear “Small affordable houses!” and begin screaming to their local political office-holder, “OMG-Poor people! It’s affordable housing for poor people! OMG! Keep away, keep them far, far away!” Still, one would think that smaller, more compact houses would make so much good sense to developers and builders. Maybe it is.

Along the outer ring highway in San Antonio, a large apartment complex has been going in for months – but at the back of the complex, bounded by a small back road which we routinely use as a short-cut, there is a range of smaller units going in. At first, when they began pouring the slabs for them, we wondered if they were to be garages – but no; from the layout, no way to get a vehicle safely in or out, When the walls began going up, we could see that – no, the back half of the complex will be small cottages, and small duplexes. Interesting. Well, not everyone likes to live in a third-floor walkup, hauling groceries up two flights of stairs, with the noise from neighbors through thin walls at all hours … better a small, self-contained little house, with a decent separation from the neighboring unit, or only the other half of the tiny duplex. We wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come; of builders seeing that there may be money to be made in catering to the ‘smaller house’ impulse. Where will the market let us all, in these trying times?

What say you? Discuss as you like.

Resolved for Next Year…

25. December 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic, Home Front

Looking back in the blog archives to December 2021, it seems that I didn’t sit down and map out goals for the new year, as I had been doing in late December in most years. The last set of new year professional and household goals I set for myself were all done and dusted in the following year, all but the one involving me being able to wear a size 10/12 pair of jeans again and finishing the Civil War novel – which is still only half-finished. Done in 2023, I absolutely promise. Over the next year, I am resolved on these several projects –

  1. As noted, finish That Fateful Lightning; a novel set in the Civil War. The first half, concerning the activities of Miss Minerva Templeton Vining in the Abolitionist movement in the 1840s and 1850s is more or less complete – it’s her experiences as a battlefield nurse during the war that I have been putting off. I’m not certain why – just that I will have to immerse myself in a fresh round of research and that readers of Civil War historical fiction will be going over it all with a fine-tooth comb.
  2. Finish the latest Jim Reade-Toby Shaw adventure collection; it will be titled Lone Star Blood and comprise five or six short adventures loosely based on the Lone Ranger legend … only set in the era of the Republic of Texas, historically accurate and less the stupid mask, the silver bullets, and the magnificent white horse. Like the above, it is half-complete.
  3. Complete Luna City #12. That, unlike items 1 & 2, isn’t even begun yet, although I do have some partially-formed notions of what the various story arcs will accomplish.

Moving on to goals for the household. I considered getting vinyl flooring installed in the rest of the house, but after talking it over with my daughter, decided to wait on that one until she has moved herself and Jamie into her own house, which will happen after she completes several profitable years in real estate. At least a quarter of the furniture will go with her, which will make it much easier for me. I did the den flooring myself, but that was a small room, and even so, exhausting. More realistic intentions are –

  1. Get the short length of privacy fence and a gate from the side of the garage to the gatepost at the corner of my next-door-neighbors’ property – this to enclose a small private patio by the front bedroom, a patio already accessed by a French door. This would increase security at the front of the house and provide a secure play area for Wee Jamie. It will also baffle the heck out of delivery drivers and door-to-door salespeople looking for the front door, but that’s a price I’m willing for them to pay.
  2. Get one of those inserts for the slider door which incorporates a pet door, so that the cats can go in and out of their own will. I’d also like to move at least one of the litter boxes to the catio and finally, to replace patio furniture which was basically destroyed by cats and a series of dogs. I used to love sitting out on the back porch when it was temperate, watching the sun go down, and the birds fussing around the bird feeders.
  3. For certain, now that the back yard is secure with a solid new fence – start with chickens again. Four for choice, as we had several years ago. We really did like having fresh eggs, and so did our neighbors.
  4. Get the dryer vent professionally cleaned, for once and all. We’ve done our best to clear out the lint with various consumer gadgets, but we suspect that the vent is at the point where it does needs a full top-to-bottom scouring.
  5. This may be an optional item – but see to having the chimney swept and inspected. We haven’t had a fire in it for years, and in the event of the next snowmagedden and subsequent power outage, it would be nice to be able to burn wood in the fireplace without taking down the entire house.

And that’s my set of goals for 2023. The mortgage on the house itself has just two more years to go, and once that is done, I can turn to paying off bills for the work done on the siding and the replacement windows.

It’s Beginning to Lot Like Christmas

19. December 2022 · Comments Off on It’s Beginning to Lot Like Christmas · Categories: Domestic

Well, this next weekend, is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and I think we have just about everything squared away. The last of the gifts that I ordered after doing so very well at New Braunfels’ Heritage Society museum last weekend were delivered on Friday, wrapped and set under the tree, near the tree, hung from the stocking hangers (to escape a pee-blessing from one of the cats establishing possession) or in the Christmas stockings for the designated recipients. The care-packages of Texas foods to my brother and to my sister’s families were mailed on Monday. The tree is up and decorated, my daughter’s Christmas village is laid out … and I have spent the last four days making fudge – the gift that we have been giving to friends, neighbors, establishments that we do business with … it seems that we can afford to give this bounty this year, having stashed away certain essential ingredients. For a good few years, we cut bite-sized bits of fudge and put them into paper cups, packaged in tins from the Dollar Tree, which made a pretty presentation, but that has just turned out to be labor-intensive, messy, wasteful and eventually too expensive. We’ll go with two- or three-inch square chunks wrapped in saran wrap and labeled with what flavor that it is, and stacked in pastry boxes … less messy, that way.

(Note to self – must do a separate nut-free package especially for the partner at Brakeworks, where all the routine work on our cars has been done for at least two decades. Justin is allergic to tree nuts …)

One last batch of fudge, to replace the one batch which has turned out to be less than optimal – there is always that one batch which fails to solidify properly. We did something wrong in following directions, mistakenly didn’t simmer the basic sugar-butter-condensed milk/crème mixture long enough to congeal, added a critical ingredient at the wrong time … or as mostly turns out with one of the most temperamental fudges, the Chocolate Mint Bavarian, didn’t melt the milk chocolate in a microwave… or over a pot of simmering water. There’s always one batch which has to be thrown out as a flat failure. This we have come to accept.

And Saturday, we checked the last item of the list, driving up to Boerne so that Wee Jamie could have his picture taken with an obliging Santa. It took us a bit of time to have the Santa tracked down to his lair at J-Fork on the Main Street – we had thought to have lunch in Boerne, but all the places which served food which we might have relished were crowded … and eventually, we settled for some pastry at Richter’s, and resolved to pick up something to make supper out of at the meat market in Bergheim on our way home. That enterprise is now in the building which served as the general store, which was dim and cramped and had a bit of everything … but now is open under new management and is bright and airy. Honestly, I hope that they can keep it all going. The ground chuck that we bought for patty melts was fabulous., and Benjy the Dog is still working away at the length of cow leg-bone that we bought there for him.

Christmas is a’ Coming

07. December 2022 · Comments Off on Christmas is a’ Coming · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic

… perhaps the goose is getting fat but given how much a frozen goose or even a duck costs at the local grocery (which does stock such exotic fowl in the freezer case) the body mass index of a frozen goose will forever remain a mystery to me. We’ll do Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner, having maxed out our toleration for turkey leftovers after Thanksgiving. I blame this on Mom, whose’ insanely developed sense of thrift led her to prepare a gargantuan turkey for Thanksgiving, and then part it out into a series of leftover meals for most of the following month; Hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey croquettes, turkey stir-fry, turkey a la king, turkey and noodles, turkey pot pie… ad infinite. Just when we had finished the turkey soup, brewed from the bones and scraps of the carcass, here came Christmas with another month of eternal turkey, strong to save. Still, turkey and the interminable trail of leftovers is more appetizing than the bugs that our international self-selected overlords would want us to eat for supper, because of the allegedly-imperiled environment … ahh, enough of those cynical thoughts.

It’s coming on to Christmas, and although certain commercial establishments have been laying on the Christmas stuff for at least a month or so (looking at you, Hobby Lobby) now that Thanksgiving is done and dusted, in my house we are looking forward to Christmas. We have a lighted tree and a boatload of decorations, and my daughter has collected several lots of ornamental Santas, nutcrackers, angels, lighted candles, and a small city of small ceramic houses. Out go the usual bookshelf and tabletop ornaments, and in come the Christmas things. And we haven’t even gotten around to putting up the Christmas tree and decorating it, yet.

Our Christmas season really begins with Christmas on the Square in Goliad. I looked back in my various archives, and it appears that we did that event for the first time in 2009, and returned every year since then, on the first Saturday in December to participate with my books in Miss Ruby’s Corral of Authors. Sometimes we were in a pavilion, sometimes in a covered porch, or most often, in a small shop front on the Square. This year is the very first time that I went alone, as my daughter had her real estate brokerage Christmas party that very evening. The drive to Goliad is two hours each way; too exhausting a day to then go out and party all evening. So I went by myself, with two tubs of books; the Corral was only mildly busy this year, although we have known worse; the year that it was 20 degrees, with a howling icy wind comes to mind. I was disappointed at only selling five books, but one of the other authors only sold a single book, and she had brought a huge inventory. Wierdly, four of my sales were for sets of Lone Star Sons and Lone Star Glory; my YA collections which re-tell the Lone Ranger, only historically accurate and ditching the mask and the silver bullets and all.

Then, after decorating the inside of the house; the mantle, the bookshelves, the doorway, and the big shelf in the den, and hanging lights along the eaves outside, the next element is the yearly fudge making. We make big batches of fudge to give away to friends, neighbors, trusted businesses, delivery drivers, and a large plate each for the fire stationhouse across the way, and the police substation – all that is a chore which takes up much of a week, what with making, packaging and delivery. We like to do about six or seven varieties; regular chocolate with nuts and cranberries, brown sugar pecan, a white chocolate with coconut, peanut butter with chocolate, and a creamsicle orange or berry, and a couple of other more conventional chocolate fudge varieties. We hit upon this as a seasonal gift for friends and neighbors after a visit some years ago to a candy shop in Fredericksburg, after which my daughter mused, ‘how hard could it be?’ and it was such a hit with the immediate neighbors that we went on doing it. It’s a chore, and an not-inconsiderable expense, although to our relief it looks as if it will be doable this year, anyway. We have a stash of chocolate and other ingredients, and Costco has bulk chocolate on offer. So we’re good for this year. And that’s were our Christmas stands, by fits and starts – what about yours?

The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe?

28. November 2022 · Comments Off on The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Health and Wellness, Media Matters Not, Stupidity

I speak of the tipping point, when toleration of what is euphemistically termed ‘gender-affirming medical care’ for minor children and teens (otherwise known as chemical and surgical mutilation) flips hard over from the trendy, laudable and even fashionable into the “Oh, Hell NO!” side, after so many years of being put out there as trendy, laudable, etc. by all super-tolerant, oh-so-progressive activists in the media, politics and the oh-so-superior intellectuals.

It all rather reminds me of the great satanic day-care ritual abuse panic of the mid-1980s, where a combination of guilt-stricken parents, manipulative “experts”, amoral prosecutors, buffaloed law enforcement and a news media panting for sensational headlines all combined in a great storm of panic … a panic which everyone eventually realized, with a sense of mild shame was wholly without grounds. But not before a lot of innocent people were railroaded, tried, found guilty and had their lives and livelihoods thoroughly wrecked. Only a very few news reporters stood against the panic. One of those few was a woman reporter for, of all things, New York’s uber-lefty tabloid, the Village Voice, who was following a local case, and basically saying, “Hello! How is this even remotely possible, the baroque and improbably ornate stories of abuse that these kids are reporting? Seriously – are you all out of your minds?!” (Yes, I read the Village Voice – the Stars and Stripes bookstore carried it, along with all the other periodicals. I liked Nat Hentoff’s column.)

It seems like the first wave is now breaking on the shore of reality: those twenty and thirty-somethings who feel they were rushed higgledy-piggledy into taking a cocktail of puberty-cancelling drugs and submitting to irreversible surgical procedures and have now lived to regret it – and have the courage now (born of desperation and disillusion) to speak up about their unhappiness over what they felt they were rushed into, against vicious social media abuse from the pro-trans crowd. Those human Guinea pigs are coming to the realization of the full irreversible horror of what was done to them, in the service of a warped gender ideology. Yes, they were kids, and yes, they were stupid and impulsive, in battening onto what they were told by authority-figures, to include teachers, the fashionable elite in the media (many brandishing their trans-kids like some kind of warped status symbol) and reaffirmed by their peers. Their peers were likewise stupid, impulsive, and gullible beyond belief, but that’s what teenagers are, and social media only makes peer pressure more intense. Their parents were bowled over by authority figures, perhaps even kept out of the loop entirely … or maybe even in the worse cases, were heart and soul for the trans process, which can be seen as a kind of venomous Munchausen-by-proxy.

And now those who regretted what they were enabled to do, are bringing legal suit, and speaking out. This would have been predicted by practically anyone with a pulse who paid appalled attention. Seriously, anyone who considered this for longer than two minutes knew that this would happen – and that the hapless victims of peer pressure, adolescent angst and a degree of body dysmorphia would come to regret it. It’s even a minor plot point in Kurt Schlichter’s latest dystopian adventure – a militia formed of vengeful adults, who were hustled into trans-surgery. They call themselves “The Mutilated” and as outlined in the novel … they are angry – savagely and murderously angry.
So – is the tipping point with regard to minor children and teens about to happen? Discuss.

A Grand Puzzlement

21. November 2022 · Comments Off on A Grand Puzzlement · Categories: Ain't That America?, Geekery, General, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts, Technology

There are certain things that I just don’t “get”. No matter how hard I try and wrap my mind around the topic, it just stubbornly refuses to engage, sitting in a little sullen lump in the corner and obstinately saying “No.” Because of this, the higher mathematic fields have always been closed to me, either through natural disinclination or having been traumatized in getting blind-sided by the New Math in the third grade. Wisely, I stuck to the simpler, practical methods to do with numbers, and left esoteric maths to those who had a bent for them. I have other talents.
That being admitted and perhaps in relation to such an inability, I could never quite grasp the method and appeal of bitcoin.

Why was it a ‘thing’, other than a lot of people seemed to believe that bitcoinage was a ‘thing’? Bitcoin always seemed to me to be like the medium of exchange used in on-line role-playing games; a thing of value because everyone involved insisted on and agreed that it was. As for the concept of ‘mining bitcoin’, other than it involved a lot of time on the computer, and something to do with solving long and complicated formulae … Nope, just could not “get” how that all worked, and what if anything, bitcoin was based on, other than being trendy. It was all vaporous, it meant whatever anyone said that it meant, and no two people seemed to agree on how bitcoins were generated. So my daughter and I were never particularly drawn towards anything to do with bitcoin, or bitcoin wallets, investments or exchanges … especially since so many of the communications that we (my daughter more than me) received about bitcoinage appeared to be scammers. Something so thoroughly fenced around by a poisonous reek of scam made us both wary and we declined involvement, in any way, shape or form. Sensible in hindsight, considering the near-apocalyptic collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Futures Exchange.

A truism to live by – like high-explosives, if you don’t understand it, don’t play around with it.

Well, it could have been worse – might have been tulip bulbs. (Oh, that Charles Mackay is not alive in this century – how many more chapters could he have added to his magnum opus!) It was curious and ironic that Bankman-Fried and his merry band of wonderkind were so elevated by the finance press … as if he had discovered some great hitherto unknown secret to grubbing wealth unfathomable, secrets unknown to the rest of us mere mortals. The subsequent crash and burn, as well as the fury of those rooked out of their very real investments is a mater of academic interest to those of us who had the native intelligence not to go messing about in something we really didn’t understand.

Bankman-Fried and his friends appear to be the children of privilege – just like Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos ill-fame, who by striking coincidence, was sentenced this week. Like Bankman-Fried, Holmes was taken up by the press and by the great, good, and the well-connected, few of whom appeared to have actual specific knowledge of the field that she claimed expertise in. She conned a great many people who ought to have been warier or known better into backing her blood-testing enterprise – an undertaking that I am certain was as mysterious as is the generation of bitcoinage to laymen… or laywoman. But she fooled the well-connected and media outlets for years, just like Bankman-Fried did, and now everyone who ever bought into the hype has egg, metaphorically-speaking, on their faces. One wonders how much of it was due to the intensely favorable press … and how much the assumption from those who enthusiastically backed Theranos, that ‘she’s one of us, one of the elite, well-connected, gradate of a prestigious university, the daughter of so-and-so; she couldn’t possibly intend to pull a scam on us!’ I assume that it was the same with Bankman-Fried; ‘oh, he couldn’t possibly scam us! He’s one of us!”
Comment and discuss as you wish.

The Pleasures of Yew-Toob

21. November 2022 · Comments Off on The Pleasures of Yew-Toob · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Geekery, General, That's Entertainment!

Last fall, when my daughter and I both fell temporarily to the covid plague, one of my respites was sitting at my computer with Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson in my lap, watching various videos on YouTube. We were not exactly sick … just not very well; easily tired, devoid of energy and interest in anything that lasted very long. Wee Jamie had a low-grad temperature for a day or so, and sniffles, so his health was never in any particular danger. Neither was ours, once some serious drugs had knocked out the covid-induced pneumonia … but the two of us, Wee Jamie and I came away from those weeks with a decided fondness for ten or a dozen YouTube series – some of the home renovation off-the-grid living, a couple of ‘build a shelter from raw materials and a few basic tools’ – look, hard work fascinates me, I could watch it for hours. (Our Restoration Nation, Red Poppy Ranch, Trent & Allie, Lesnoy_Craft … respectively, various locations in the south, somewhere in the inland northwest, in Utah, and somewhere in … maybe Russia? We also liked some of the model-building shows; one an Australian, the other a German, both of whom do the most amazing dioramas and small structures. (Luke Towan, and Samy-Modelblau. Oh, the things that you can make from thick cardboard, and a range of model-making supplies! And wire … and resin…)

But the ones that we liked the best, and from which I came away from with a severe case of power-tool envy were the various renovation/restoration channels; a variety of specialists doing amazing things in renovating, refinishing, and repairing old furniture, restoring seriously wrecked and rusted agricultural or domestic items, and restoring them to attractive functionality. It’s kind of soothing, watching rust being blasted away in a sand-blasting booth. I so wish now that I had been permitted to take wood and metal shop in junior high school – instead of cooking and sewing. I already knew how to cook and sew … but this was when shop classes were strictly reserved for the boys, and the home-making sills were likewise reserved for girls. (You know – back before the Noachian flood. Although Dad did his best to teach my brothers and sister and I, outside of school)

The thing that does get me is that these various specialists really ran the gamut of nationalities – and that some of them never even appeared as more than their hands, doing the work. Veradona Restoration is Czech, AT Restoration, as near as I can figure out, is based in Estonia, one of the Baltic States. LADB is French, and so mysterious that all one ever sees of the experts featured is their hands. I think that there are three of them – one young, one middle-aged, one old, just to judge from close-ups of the hands doing the detail work – woodwork, metal fabrication, rust removal. They have a charming ginger cat-familiar hanging about the incredibly-well equipped workshop; Avril, who appears in most episodes.

Then there is Epic Upcycling, featuring a stone-faced Canadian carpenter-genius, who builds the most ornate and substantial furniture out of old pallets and miscellaneous scrap. Seriously, never give this man an acre of old shipping containers, I think he would build a whole fantastically-original city, or at least a suburb out of them. The pieces of furniture are fantastic – complicated, ornate … and he builds his own metal hinges, handles, locks and stuff. My thought is that of course, the designs are that ornate because the wood he builds them out of is basically waste product, of which (from the occasional glimpses of his wood stash) he may have cornered the available market in used pallets. What he could do with fine wood would rival anything built for Versailles. Or any other 17th, 18th or 19th century palace.

Ah, the pleasures of watching knowledgeable craftsmen and women at work … although I am pretty certain that all the disasters are off-camera or edited out.

Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary

11. November 2022 · Comments Off on Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary · Categories: History, Military, Veteran's Affairs, War

(For Veteran’s Day – a reprise post from 2018)

There is a lovely little classical piece by Maurice Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed shortly after the end of the war, five of the six movements dedicated to the memory of an individual, and one for a pair of brothers, all close friends of the composer, every one of them fallen in a war of such ghastliness that it not only put paid to a century of optimistic progress, but barely twenty years later it birthed another and hardly less ghastly war. Maurice Ravel himself was over-age, under-tall and not in the most robust of health, but such was the sense of national emergency that he volunteered for the military anyway, eventually serving as a driver – frequently under fire and in danger. Not the usual place to find one of France’s contemporarily-famous composers, but they did things differently at the end of the 19th Century and heading all wide-eyed and optimistic into the 20th. Citizens of the intellectual and artistic ilk were not ashamed of their country, or feel obliged to apologize for a patriotic attachment, or make a show of sullen ingratitude for having been favored by the public in displaying their talents.

The war whose casualties Ravel memorialized in that way ended exactly a hundred years ago today; the eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour. It seems now to have been unimaginably distant at this point. The soldiers who fought in it for every nation and yet managed by pluck and luck to survive are all gone now … but like a long-healed wound, that war left horrific scars both physical and psychic. Woodlands and meadows the length of the Western Front across Belgium and France to this day are still marked by trenchworks, crumbling fortifications, the soil still poisoned by chemicals. All across Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, what remained of Austria-Hungary – and the US, to a lesser extent – the smallest villages and the largest cities alike have memorials. Sometimes they are in odd corners, most often in a prominent place, with engraved tablets of names; the most notable were usually designed by the architectural great and good, standing on or near the battlefields themselves. The smallest memorials are sometimes the most moving – especially when the same handful of names appear. Everyone in this tiny village would have known this man or that, not just the immediate family and friends. This man, his neighbor, the boy who polished boots or delivered the mail; this and this, a hundred and a thousand times over. When those memorial monuments were first put up, the loss of the men – and sometimes of women – was a raw and savage grief. The observer picks up immediately on the sense of loss, the grief, the futile attempt to make a sense out of the cruelty visited on that community; they were here, they were of value, and now they are gone! The only thing we can do is to remember them.

The political and psychic scars from the First World War, I think, have proved to be the deepest, and the longest-lasting. We are still dealing politically with the fall-out and the razor-edged shards of broken empires. The Austro-Hungarian empire splintered into component nations; Russia replaced the Romanovs and old ruling nobility with an even more vicious ruling class, the Ottoman Empire both splintered geographically, replacing the old inefficient Sultanate with an equally inefficient and/or vicious assortment of local ruling talent. Germany, wracked in defeat, replaced their supreme ruler serially with inefficient democracy and then crowned that debacle with Hitler, suffering another round of defeat and division. France – gutted of a generation of able, healthy and patriotic young men, required for the continuance of a stable society, those friends whom Ravel honored and mourned in his composition. Great Britain and her far-flung Empire, also gutted of men and the supreme societal self-confidence required to maintain that Empire, fell apart on a slower timetable. Documented in small and large ways in western literature and in even popular contemporary genre novels, the war marked a turning, a vast gulf, a shattering of the old, 19th Century optimism, and the certainty that things were bound – with the aid of science and industry – to only get better and better for that part of the world which thought of itself as ‘civilized.’ To the characters created for a mass audience by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and any number of others – there seems in retrospect to be a “before” and an “after” to the war, which slashed a sharp dividing line across the cultural landscape; skirts were shorter, morals looser, music louder and more discordant, politics more rancorous, manners coarsened and buildings uglier. The shock and the loss of certainty in so much which had once been thought solid, stable, eternal … the reverberations when the guns finally fell silent on that day are still rippling across our consciousness, even when we don’t quite know why.

Also – found through Ace of Spades HQ – a meditation on Veteran’s Day, and how the Vietnam veterans were treated by the public – and generally slimed as unstable, drug-addled losers by the media for years after the war was over. I’m old enough to remember how veterans in the early 1970s were advised to leave a term of military service off their professional resumes.

Casting the Oracle Stones

07. November 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Media Matters Not, Politics, World

So the voters go to the polls tomorrow – well, those who haven’t done early voting or mailed in their ballot – and possibly by Wednesday, we will know the results from those places which have it together in tallying up the ballots. (It might take days and weeks longer, for results from places that don’t have all their ducks neatly lined up). I see two possible outcomes, both grounds for considerable foreboding.

Number one: Organized, systematic, blatant ballot fraud on the part of Democrat party operatives in precincts and cities most particularly open to it; fraud that is so naked, open and in-your-face that it can’t be hidden, disguised or explained away – fraud which allows the Democrats to claim an overwhelming victory, aided and abetted by a tame national media.

That, of course, will outrage Republicans and moderates, possibly to the point of not accepting the claimed Democrat victory. A victory won through masses of manufactured, fraudulent ballots reduces this country to the condition of a banana republic, and arbitrary rule by a party elite singularly uninterested in anything but perpetuating their own power and control. I do believe that most trending red states who have put steps in place to prevent massive voting fraud will see state and local elections that are honestly and openly won; citizens will be able to accept the results there. It’s the federal government that will most likely lose any credibility with at least half, and maybe more of the citizenry.

Number two: the Republican red wave is so overwhelming as to knock any Democrat attempts to gain by vote fraud. In which case, the existing federal powers-that-be will be … extremely unhappy, to put it mildly. The national media establishment will be screaming bloody murder, of course; even more loudly and insultingly than they are already. Perhaps the Democrat establishment and the Biden administration (or whoever is pulling Biden’s strings) will attempt to declare election invalid, cancel and throw the whole election overboard and/or refused to seat those newly-elected to federal office – or worse. The media and the Democrat establishment are already setting the stage for declaring a Republican victory “problematic.”

Some further predictions:
No matter how the election results shake out, the national news media will go off-the-chart barking at the moon insane.

Elon Musk will be having more fun reorganizing Twitter than most normal human beings are allowed to have.

It will not be strictly necessary for Democrat Party authority figures to order the official organs to inflict violence upon those they perceive as inimical to the Ruling Party – all that they need to is exclaim, in the manner of Henry II, “Will no one rid me of that troublesome priest!?” – and the deranged, unbalanced and violently-inclined will take it as permission.

Jay Manifold has also done a post looking at aspects of this weeks’ election and possible outcomes and aftermath. I am operating at a more intuitive level, but my conclusions align with his. The next few weeks and months will be ugly, and the various parties who take politics and power very seriously will react … and very likely with violence. Mike K’s very cogent comment on my last post, regarding the demonization of conservative opinion and those who hold such, and the “Nazi” slur so freely thrown about, also deserves consideration.
Buckle in – it’s going to be a very bumpy ride.

The Lightning Rod

03. November 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Good God, Health and Wellness, Media Matters Not, Rant, Science!, Veteran's Affairs

I am thinking that Professor Emily “Litella” Oster (hat tip to NeoNeocon) did not expect so furious a reaction as she has gotten, by writing this particular article in The Atlantic Magazine. After having done her stalwart best for the Covid Crusade for more than two years – demonizing those who refused to get the vaccination or wear masks everywhere, or see our children locked out of school, or who suggested that ivermectin or chloroquine might alleviate the symptoms – Professor Oster now is suggesting that … really, it was all just a silly misunderstanding, she and her pals just got carried away but they meant well and didn’t know anything for certain, and why can’t we all just all forgive and forget?

To which the instantaneous and outraged reply is – not just no, but hell no. Hell no, with a napalm-degree flaming side order of very personal reasons why not. The comments on various blogs which have discussed the original article are so lit that they might as well be one of those tornadoes of fire which sometimes happen when a forest fire gets so large that it creates its’ own weather. Professor Oster, apparently living secure in her pleasant little academic and media bubble, appears to have had no notion of the damage to so many ordinary people outside of it – and damage felt on a painfully personal level. Commenters related stories of friends, spouses, neighbors suffering and dying from conditions that they couldn’t get a diagnosis of and/or treatment for – because they couldn’t get the time of day or an appointment with a doctor or clinic. Elderly parents and kin died alone, baffled and frightened, sequestered in nursing homes or hospitals, they died when their lungs were blown out on respirators, their subsequent funerals being lonely affairs. Vacations, family celebrations, weddings, high school and college graduations, celebrations and community events of every size and degree were put on hold, cancelled, reduced, and isolated. School-aged children lost two years of their schooling and social lives, a situation only alleviated by those active and determined parents who took the situation in hand and began home schooling. The deaf and hard of hearing lost a means of communication, since they couldn’t read the lips of people talking to them – and that was not even the cruelest of what Professor Oster and her friends in the establishment media did.

That was to deliberately and willfully collude in scaring the bejesus out of that large portion of the public who believed what they saw on TV, over a virus that essentially was no more a danger to a healthy young person than the ordinary seasonal flu bug. Scared people do not react rationally – a concept proved to us over and over during the last two years. Politicians, employers, public administrators, neighbors and relatives reacted, many of them badly and hysterically. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, required masking, a wrecked economy, social isolation … a whole farrago of fail, over a virus which wouldn’t have been a hiccup in any other flu season. Ordinary people lost friends, parents, relatives, unborn and barely-born children, jobs and participation in their communities. Small business owners lost their little enterprise as well as their dreams. Employees and members of the military were forced, as a condition of continued employment, to accept vaccination and boosters against Covid with an experimental vaccine which down the line, may prove to have been more dangerous to health than Covid. Many people also lost whatever residual trust they had for so-called experts, the mass media, and the medical establishment.

And you helped and cheered on all that, Professor Oster, with every evidence of keen enjoyment – must have been the most exciting time of your life; such a feeling of purpose with a slight frisson of danger. But people were hurt, Professor Oster – hurt in inconceivable ways, and suggesting now that, gee – it was all just a misunderstanding and now we all just need to put it behind us … well, that’s just adding insult to the years-long injury.

Why I’m Not Pledging

28. October 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, Home Front, Memoir

The local public radio station here – in concert with all the other public radio stations across this blessed land of ours – is having their fall pledge drive this week. And I am defiantly not pledging to support. I am willfully and maliciously denying my dollars, in spite of their blandishments and incessant unrelenting guilt trips. This, in spite of the fact that I worked part-time for the classical music side of that enterprise some decades past, before all the part-time announcers were let go. I thought for weeks that it was only me, that my announcing work was unsat. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the reason, as I had gone very rote and mechanical over announcing the name of the piece of music up next, the composer and performing orchestra or soloist, and throwing in a bit of relevant information about the piece. No, it wasn’t me, as I later found out; they left all the other part-time shift announcers go – the girl who worked during the week at an animal shelter, the woman who was a mainstay of the local little theater group, the guy who was a full-time writer for various little local publications. All of us were served notice; a kind of Friday Night employment massacre.

It was a positive relief not to have to drive across San Antonio in a wonky car, in time to make it to the Saturday afternoon shift, although I did miss sometimes … well, no, I don’t miss anything. Except for the paycheck for shift of work that I could have done in my sleep, a tour of duty in a high-rise building with a magnificent view – that bit was nice. As it eventually turned out, though, I could get along very well without it. The station came into a bomb of money, and wanted to go into covering local news, rather than paying live bodies to play classical recordings at night and over the weekends. They preferred to take the classical feed from Minnesota Public Radio. I guess that it worked out cheaper in the long run.

When did my serious disenchantment begin to flower? Probably sometime after 9-11, and that was with the Morning Edition – All Things Considered side of the NPR house. I just didn’t feel it anymore. Prairie Home Companion, as hosted by Garrison Keillor, just got more and more out of tune with genuine fly-over-country Americans as it went on. Garrison Keillor became more vicious, hateful, and obnoxious, which was really a pity, as he had put on a good act there, for decades – of affection for small-town America. All that went by the board – I bailed from Prairie Home Companion and never went back. I think that I stopped listening to public news radio a couple of months into Barack Obama’s turn in the White House. The slobbering full-frontal worship of the Wonder Black Prince of Chicago was just too much to bear. The final nail in the coffin of my affection for NPR came with the rise and subsequent deliberate media murder of the Tea Party. Our local chapter was formed of as earnest, well-educated, engaged and publicly responsible as a group of citizens as could be found anywhere – and yet the national media, to include NPR routinely sneered at and slandered Tea Party organizations as gatherings of stupid, uneducated, bigoted hicks.

My affection for the classical music side of our local public radio has also thinned out considerably over the last year, as those who programmed the daily feed of classical selections went all out for gay pride, women’s history and black history months with effusive commentary and frequent selections of certain composers. It seems now that black history month has lasted for a whole year, and with announcers pounding incessantly on the merits of composers like Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, the Chevalier St. George, and William Grant Still. Since Florence Price was black and also a woman, I swear we got a double ration of Dances in the Canebrakes. Look, all the above were perfectly acceptable as composers of listenable classical music, but constantly replaying their compositions at the expense of the whole realm of other classical composers and musicians? Persistent wokery reaches it’s slimy tentacles into every single refuge that there is over the last few years. Comment as you wish.

Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Et Cetera

19. October 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Media Matters Not, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

“There are known knowns, things we know that we know;
and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld

So last week’s post regarding the paucity of lefty anti-war protesters regarding the Ukrainian war is still going strong with comments, reminding me once again of the great sage, Donald Rumsfeld, regarding what we know, and what we know that we don’t know … and what we really don’t know that we don’t know.
What do I know for sure about the war? I know that both sides are … parsimonious with the truth about everything that is happening in the zone of conflict, to the point where a truckload of salt is necessary when reading the headlines, no matter if it’s the established print media, or blogs. What to believe? Practically nothing, save that yes, indeed, there is a war and a pretty hot one, too.
I am pretty certain that Ukraine served basically as the Biden family’s ATM. Corrupt government – yeah, that I do believe. But as corrupt than Russia itself, Nigeria, Pakistan, Belarus, South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Venezuela, and other frequent fliers on ‘most corrupt evah!’ list?
I do believe that Putin’s Russia apparently went into the Ukraine believing that it would be a one-two punch and settled to the advantage of Russia within a fortnight. That the war has been going on without a resolution since February of this year argues that Putin and his generals did indeed bite off more than they could chew, seriously overestimating their own capabilities and the Ukrainian will to resist.
The modern Ukrainians are descended from the Cossacks, in culture if not in blood, who had for centuries a tradition of making war … enthusiastically. They also, if I read my history right, still hold a grudge for being subjected to the Holodomor, the mass starvation under Stalin’s harsh rule in the 1930s. And that has to cast a very long shadow, among survivors of that state-instituted horror and their descendants.

I still wonder at the absence of serious peace protestors. Why, one might even hazard a supposition that the Biden administration really and truly wants a nuclear war, as an excuse to crush any of this insurrection talk. Wartime measures, for the good of the nation – that’s always been a fine pretext for crushing domestic opposition. And our current American ruling class certainly wouldn’t shed any tears over the deaths of flyover country, conservative middle- or working-class Americans – their open contempt for ordinary citizens can’t even be hidden any more.
Was the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines deliberate or accidental? That’s one of those elements which falls into the category of known unknowns. The blogger Lawdog (whose Africa tales of his youth, growing up as the dependent of an oil industry manager are freaking hilarious) postulated an industrial accident. Now if we had a national news media worth anything, reporters would be taking Lawdog’s suggestion to as many oil and gas industry experts as they could get ahold of, asking them for their opinions. Alas, too many reporters for the national media who aren’t Salena Zito, are instead expensively educated twenty-somethings who don’t know anyone who drives a pickup truck … and very likely many of those experienced oil industry experts do drive a pickup truck and live way outside of the Acela Corridor. Just too infra dig to talk to one of those icky people, y’know.
Another known unknown – that retention and recruiting in our own military is collapsing. That last withdrawal from Afghanistan was a debacle, and the current fixation on DEI initiatives, dodgy Covid vaccinations and general incompetence among generals is doing a number on morale and effectiveness among the troops. Exactly how deep morale among our own armed forces has collapsed, right along with retention and recruiting is a deep dark secret. Probably one would have to take pliers to the fingernails of our current Secretary of Defense to get any straight answers at all … but the sense that my daughter and I get through our various veteran networks does not give any cause for reassurance.
And then there are the unknown unknowns… comment as you wish.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?*

14. October 2022 · Comments Off on Where Have All the Flowers Gone?* · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Health and Wellness, Military, War

It’s an ongoing mystery to me, in this year of 2022, with a hot war going on in the Ukraine and the Biden Administration (or the Kalorama Kominturn which apparently holds the puppet strings) apparently doing everything it can to provoke Russia into turning the war even hotter … that the usual peace activists, who have been out to protest US involvement in every conflict going since I was in the 6th grade are nowhere to be found. Seriously, where are they – the usual peace activists, with their signs and protests at the gates of military bases, at recruiting offices and at the Pentagon … where are they? Where are the activist priests and nuns, the 60’s retreads, the determined if slightly addled, who used to routinely break into the back reaches of certain air bases in the southwest, searching for munitions and aircraft that they could splash blood-red paint and slogans all over, much to the bafflement of the security police patrols who often found them wandering in the desert, armed with buckets of paint and towering self-righteousness … yes, I had acquaintances in the security police back then, who often regaled me with tales like this.
Every time that matters of a military nature with regard to the US were about to turn from a warm simmer to red hot – there they were, on the ground, fulminating in the groves of academy, or on the pages of such reliably progressive publications like Harper’s, of the NY Times, and in the streets of Washington D.C. – there were the peace activists protesting. It was like the birds flying south for the winter; regular and predictable, until now. So, where are the deeply and ostentatiously committed peaceniks now? Are they out protesting the very real possibility of a nuclear war with Russia over independence of the Ukraine? Where are the Ramsay Clarkes, Noam Chomskys, even the Cindy Sheehans of 2022, the impassioned student peace marchers?
There was always a suspicion – and depending on the year and the conflict – a well-founded suspicion that many organized peace and anti-nuclear protest groups were Soviet-funded – and if so, I do wonder if they still are. Are the Soviet checks bouncing, or are they not being sent at all, since … open war with the United States is what Putin and his allies in what remains of the Soviet Union really want? Could it be that the Biden Administration also wants an open war with Russia, as a distraction and a ready excuse to crack down on critics and political opposition? Place your bets, ladies, gentlemen and uncommitted beings. Your insights are appreciated.

* Classical reference, link here.

Stronk Wimmin!

12. October 2022 · Comments Off on Stronk Wimmin! · Categories: Literary Good Stuff

It rather seems, reading some of the movie and book criticism from various angles and for various recent mass-entertainment productions (both literary and cinegraphic) that the necessity for a female character to be a strong, fearless, unstoppable Mary Sue, without flaw and above reproach has overridden any impulse to tell a good story with believable human beings … which ultimately makes for bad and unrealistic storytelling. There’s no dramatic potential in a basically flawless character. Apparently, the audience is supposed to stand about, slack-jawed in appreciation of the amazingness of such paragons of female perfection.

Which is kind of sad, really; an offense against the concept of an author being the creator of entertaining stories and interesting characters. It limits the story-teller to just a few predictable tropes; no room for creating real, human, relatable and sympathetic characters. I do like to think I have managed to avoid such tropes, mostly because I’ve always tried to simply create characters, interesting and complicated characters, whose maleness or femaleness is just one single aspect of their character and their story arc. For my first two historicals, To Truckee’s Trail and the Adelsverein Trilogy, the standout, and tent-pole characters (that is – the characters who hold up the whole thing) were male: Dr. John Townsend of wagon train fame (who was a real person, BTW) and early Texas Ranger and Goliad Massacre survivor Carl Becker. (Created out of whole cloth.) But as essential elements of the plot, they were matched with able and strong female characters. Dr. Townsend had his wife Elizabeth, who started as a near-invalid and finished as a member of the party chosen to be part of the horseback rescue party when the wagon train was close to being stranded by show in the high Sierras, as well as the temporary single mother Isabella Patterson, determined to get her wagon and brood of children safely over the wilderness trail to rejoin her husband in California. Carl Becker was matched with Magda Vogel, the immigrant German girl, who was by way of being a tentpole character herself – backbone of her family, wife, mother and eventually the matriarch of her extended family. But she started the arc of that narrative as a slightly awkward but intellectually inclined teenager.

Carl Becker’s sister Margaret was merely a walk-on in the Trilogy, but she was the main character in the next two novels. (Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart), growing from a dreamy girl into that strong woman – but it was in progression, and for a good part of the way, Margaret was mainly motivated by suppressed fury and resentment over how she had inevitably been let down by every single significant man in her life that she had really depended on. She finished that arc in finally appreciating and loving that brainy but socially unskilled man who adored her unreservedly, and who never had let her down … and whom she had rather overlooked for years. So much for a strong woman.

All the other historical novels save one, The Golden Road, focused on female characters, front and center. Golden Road featured an older teen boy, Fredi Steinmetz, and his adventures in the goldmines and boomtowns of 1850s California – adventures which mostly meant that the other main characters were male, although at the end, one of his associates there turned out to be a girl masquerading as a boy, for reasons of keeping a low profile in a society in which women were few and far between. As that disguised girl acerbically pointed out to Fredi, in that place and time, no one paid any notice to a boy – but everyone noticed a woman. And that character had darned good reasons for wanting to be persistently unnoticed. She also had specific knowledge of placer mining and a set of her dead older brothers clothing to make the disguise good, until … well, never mind. Don’t want to give up too much plot.

The next three novels, which were follow-ons to the Trilogy focused chiefly on female leads – but none of the women involved started as faultless, perfect, and overwhelmingly charming Mary Sue types. Isobel and Jane, in The Quivera Trail began as Victorian women, straitjacketed, and strangled in the expectations which their relative social class placed them: Isobel the lady, who knew herself to be fat, clumsy, and socially inept, and her personal lady’s maid Jane, hampered by the limitations expected of her comparatively lowly background. Both managed, once they were set loose in Bicentennial-era America, to discover that they could be a bit more than what had originally been demanded and expected of them. I had enormous fun writing that book looking at the manner in which a fair number of Victorian-era ladies managed to overturn all conventional roles and still live quite satisfactory lives on their own terms. The husbands whom Isobel and Jane attracted were also fully fleshed individuals, by the way. I did get a bit of ironic satisfaction out of making their characters authentically pure in a Victorian manner – that they really did long to be married to manly men and accepted without question that their ultimate role in life was to be a wife and mother … but also as a side-line, to support their husbands as the second-in-command authority of whatever enterprise their husbands operated. Sophia, in Sunset and Steel Rails also followed that path, although with a stint of work as an independent woman in one of those businesses which did offer very fair terms of employment to women in the late 19th century. That would be the fearsomely high-class and high-standard hospitality national corporation, Fred Harvey Company. The Fred Harvey Company was almost a hundred years ahead of anything else which could be classified as a national hospitality chain, so that book offered me an opportunity to explore that aspect of the late 19th century frontier.

As for the most recent historical, My Dear Cousin, the whole concept is based on a matched pair of mid-century American women experiencing a world war – one as a wife and mother, the other as a military nurse, holding her own as a woman in a male-dominated sphere. Neither Peg or Vennie are wonder woman, or Mary Sue; just two young women doing the best that they can in a world which went from tranquil to perilous in the blink of an eye. Comment as you wish.

Newspeak

07. October 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, My Head Hurts

In addition to the other corruptions of our major national establishment and institutions, I think that I am most annoyed by the corruption of language. Certain euphemistic terms have come to be kind of newspeak in the Orwellian sense. In themselves such expressions are bland, anodyne and seemingly harmless, but what they mean in reality is horrific. Reproductive health care; that sounds so much better than ‘abortion’. Gender-affirming health care instead of ‘amputating breasts and male genitalia, surgically removing vaginas and massively administering puberty-altering drugs’. ‘Diversity, equity and inclusion’; there’s another harmless-sounding term, which actually means conformity, hamstringing the talented, and exclusion of the designated disfavored categories of people. ‘Disinformation’ is a much more elegant term for information that may discomfit the progressive ruling class or counter the established narrative, and ‘systemic racism’ means that minority criminal offenders are automatically excused, no matter how violent or vicious the crime they are charged with.
So, what other examples of corruption of the language can you suggest? What other newspeak terms have, as the expression has it, gotten your goat in a big way. Add in the comments.

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