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.

Blackout

20. September 2022 · Comments Off on Blackout · Categories: General

A lot of things came together this week – and one of them is the absolute end of my patience and grim toleration/indulgence of certain intellectual trends and racial sub-groups in our society. Curiously, this comes during a period of the mourning for and burial of the late sovereign Queen Elizabeth II, which in combination with some other news elements initiated this particular train of thought. My toleration of certain elements in our society has reached a critical point; to whit, I am done with black racism … and yes, black racism is an existing and very poisonous thing, as much as enablers and perpetuators of that variety of racism deny it, and our National Establishment Media try and sweep it under the rug, denying the very evidence of our lying, racist eyes. Some brutal and egregious rape-murder-kidnapping-assault happens in a city like New York, Memphis, St. Louis, Atlanta, a mass punch-out all-hands brawl in a fast-food restaurant, an amusement park or on a cruise ship, an organized mob loots a retail outlet … if there are no pictures initially of the perpetrators of such outrages against civic good order … well, everybody knows.
Everybody knows.
Everybody knows that an elderly person of white or Asian ancestry is more apt to be knocked out in the street by a male thug of color. Everybody knows that schools in black majority urban areas are snake pits of venomous disorder, places which well-meaning teachers flee. Everybody knows that the Black Lives Matter mass movement set a new land-speed record in going from cause to racket, materially benefiting only the original organizers and their subsequent investment in pricy real estate in upscale neighborhoods. Everybody knows, or at least suspects that reported racist incidents, such as Jussie Smollett, the BYU Volleyball imbroglio, the noose garage pull-down at NASCAR – all ballyhooed in the national media will eventually turn out to be to be self-aggrandizing fakes. The initial offence is headline news. But the apologetic walk-back is usually reported on page whatever. Huh. Imagine that.

I’d also suspect that there may have been actual incidents of white-on-black public racism in the last decade or so – but the well of credibility has been so poisoned that very few thinking person will credit them. There are only so many times that ‘wolf!’ can be cried, before anyone outside of the Racial Industrial Complex has any credibility. I do feel genuine sorrow for neighbors of mine, for fellow service personnel, (to include commanders and NCOICs) who are of – as one of my friends once put it – a dark year-round natural tan color – who are also good and responsible neighbors, family-oriented, law-abiding, and patriotic, in spite of their community being victimized by casual racism, general bigotry and Jim Crow laws and practices a lifetime ago … but that was then. For most of us under the age of receiving Social Security, it’s like World War Two. Something that we have heard about, seen in documentaries and heard our elders reminiscing about … but which we have never actually experienced in real life. But the grievance woobie is clung onto by the Racial Industrial Complex like a tantrum-prone toddler who can’t let go of their security blanket … because? Well, they wouldn’t be special any longer.

The criminal element among the black community – estimated to be about 4% of the population is also estimated to be responsible for about half the violent crime in the United States. That is poisonous enough, but in a lot of ways, it’s a self-limiting phenomenon. Black offenders with a penchant for violence will eventually encounter a final come-uppance: other offenders in open gang war, law-enforcement once they have pushed too far and too openly, even eventually vigilante action, should the black criminal element venture too far away from their protected turf. Vicious predators in the back country eventually run into a terminal 3-S solution.

No, the ostentatious black activists who have finally breached my personal wall of toleration for intellectual idiocy are so-called intellectuals, people like the professor at Carnegie Mellon, who wished that the late Queen Elizabeth had experienced an agonizing death. To my mild surprise, the author of those wishes is an authentic Nigerian American. Usually, it’s the native-born Americans of color in the activist community, academia, or in media who combine that degree of malice with vicious historical ignorance. Tolerations and patience among ordinary citizens already appear to be running out when it comes to the black criminal class; might it be running out for the antics of the black activists and the lunatic intellectual racists as well? Not that I think there will be any overt demonstrations, such as there would have been early in the last century; any actions taken will be more along the lines of quiet shunning and physical avoidance. Comment as you wish.

A Blast From the Past

14. September 2022 · Comments Off on A Blast From the Past · Categories: Fun and Games

Another Texas Road Trip

07. September 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?

We took Wee Jamie on another road trip, this last weekend. My daughter and I have decided that we should dedicate one day a week to “Not Doing Work Stuff” – and have an outing of at least half a day, doing something … something diverting. This long weekend demanded a whole day of ‘Not Doing Work Stuff.’ My daughter suggested a road trip to Fredericksburg, and I thought that we should check out the Museum of the Pacific War, as it has been at least five years since I visited it. It was indisputably the last war which we won, after all. The first time I went to the War Museum was maybe in 1995 – when it was all still contained in the old Nimitz Hotel on Main Street, and an annex down the road – IIRC, a side-less pole barn. (And Fredericksburg was still a sleepy little town with an attractive Main Street, with local-oriented business situated in profitable commercial real estate, where they tended to close shop and roll up the sidewalks at about 5 PM. Well, that has come to a screeching halt, I assure you.)

We took the back way, to Fredericksburg, after stopping at a local restaurant for a breakfast which turned out to be more substantial than expected – a local outlet for the Maple Biscuit Company. The fresh-squeeze orange juice was fantastic, and yes, I would know about all that, having grown up with orange trees in the back yard. The biscuits and sausage gravy were so generous and so good that we were resolved to split an order next time. (This was the last place I saw anyone wearing a mask, BTW. The staff were all masked-up.) The back way to Fredericksburg meant driving up 281 to Johnson City, passing memories all the way; Blanco, where we had done market events at the Old Courthouse, and where once we scored some amazing deals at an estate sale at an old house just off the highway. Johnson City, where we had a wonderfully fun three-day long market one year, for the lighting of the Courthouse, the weekend after Thanksgiving. (We had to stay two nights for that in a cabin at the Miller Creek RV resort, which meant that we barely broke even.)

Johnson City, when I first went through in the late 1990s, was sad and depressing in comparison to Fredericksburg. It seemed to be hanging on based on the relation to LBJ, the Johnson ranch and various residences where LBJ’s family had lived. Now it is the beginning of the Texas Wine Road and has a new lease on tourist life. Some years ago, I had suggested that the Hill Country had all the components save castles, villas, and quaint hilltop towns to become the New Provence, since they produce such Frenchified specialty items as lavender, wine, olive oil, goat milk cheeses … and wine. Oh my gosh, have they gone into producing wine. Someone has even built a castle! The usual maps of the Texas Wine Road usually include only the top twelve or fifteen of the biggest and most well-established of the wineries along 290 – or at least, those with the flashiest central building. As we discovered, just about every commercial or retail business along that road was posted as a winery, and even a couple of places, like Wildseed Farms, which initially specialized in some other commodity – like peaches or wildflower seeds – had added on a wine tasting room. If you started at the two wineries just outside Johnson City to the south and stopped at every single winery or tasting room and had a single glass … your liver would be screaming for mercy when you got to Stonewall, and you’d be on the list for a liver transplant once you got beyond Fredericksburg itself.

Yes, it looks as if every ambitious vintner wants a piece of the Hill country – and it appeared they were all doing a land office business, judging by the number of cars in the parking lots, even on a Sunday. As for the wineries and tasting rooms in Fredericksburg itself – the sidewalks and businesses were jammed; families, with children and dogs. If there is a recession in our future, it certainly wasn’t in sight in Fredericksburg; shoppers were out in force, and it looked as if all the restaurants and specialty shops were crowded with shoppers, whole families with small children, babies in strollers and dogs on a leash. However, I must regretfully admit that inflation is clearly out in force. My very favorite vintage from the Fredericksburg Winery – the Fredericksburg & Northern Red, is about ten dollars more a bottle then it was, when I first started buying it. A couple of years ago, someone who studies this kind of thing noted that the Hill Country was where Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino were thirty and forty years ago, as far as wine production went.

I wanted to see if the War Museum had ever managed to put all the relics of that war which they had in the archives on display. One of my favorite displays in the ‘liberated POW division’ was a pair of panties and a bra crocheted out of cotton string, made by one of the military nurses during her time of incarceration at the Santo Tomas internment camp. Alas, that still wasn’t an item on display, among several other clothing relics of civilian internment. When they first put up the main building for the museum, it was essentially a bare warehouse with some vehicles and aircraft parked in it, then a series of full-size dioramas, and then … well, more and more and more. It is now a tightly organized maze of displays, with arrows on the floors, and all kinds of interactive displays and videos. They have a whole B-24 on display to memorialize the Dolittle Raid, and an entire Japanese mini-sub (found adrift shortly after the raid) for the Pearl Harbor section. Models of ships, galore – I was interested to see one of the Lanakai, which had an amazing escape from the Philippines early in 1942. The Lanakai was an old sailing yacht with a diesel engine, which bounced around among various missions, owners, and nations, including being a movie prop ship, converted to military purposes as circumstances dictated. The escape of the ship and crew from the Philippines would make an amazing adventure movie – but never mind. I was glad to see that note was made of the fall of Singapore, since that features so heavily in my own last historical novel. There was not much mention made of campaigns in New Guinea and Malaya; of intense interest to Australians and Brits … but I guess there is only so much room in a museum like this, where the initial focus was on Admiral Chester Nimitz and the American campaigns.

It was so refreshing, all this crowded, happy normality – people having fun, crowding the shops and restaurants, spending money, enjoying themselves. Wee Jamie charmed everyone, and was incredibly well-behaved through the whole day, even if it was a considerable break from his routine. A woman standing next to me in the Fischer & Wieser outlet commented to her friend that she had never seen so many so many cute children and darling, friendly dogs in one single day. And I said, “Well, of course – we breed both in Texas!”

A Tipping Point?

23. August 2022 · Comments Off on A Tipping Point? · Categories: Ain't That America?, Good God, Health and Wellness, Science!

So help me Bog, I think the tipping point – that is, the end of toleration and indulgence for all things trans – is fast approaching. For all that social media, and the social media outlets masquerading as national news and entertainment outlets can pretend otherwise – ordinary people have been fed to the teeth with pro-trans propaganda and are beginning to rebel. A most unforeseen development is in the rebellion of parents and alums of a very upper-caste all-girls school against the decision by the school to admit biological males who claim that they are really girls. Well, after the experience of a public school system who were all chuffed no end at having their own special mini-tranny, who was then accused of raping a couple of genuine no-kidding XX girls … well, I’d venture to guess that the bloom is off the tranny rose whenever parents must consider the safety of their daughters. Especially well-heeled parents. Especially when a well-founded suspicion develops that male perverts are trading on claims of being trans to gain access to biological females-only spaces for jollies and their own predatory purposes, and second-rate male athletes are doing it for a chance to rate rather better in their chosen sport by competing against smaller and physically weaker competitors.

I can honestly feel sympathy for those infinitesimally small number of people born with abnormalities which made it difficult enough for the delivering OB to determine absolutely if they were male or female. How they or their parents and doctors working in concert judge and decide to resolve the situation – is not my business. I just hope that they live as well-adjusted and contented adults. I also feel the same with the similarly small number of people who decide as mature adults that they have been born in a body of the wrong gender, and quietly and over the course of years, resolve that discrepancy through therapies and surgeries and to all appearances live happily ever after. Yes, there have been a few, Wendy Carlos and Jane Morris come immediately to my mind. M-to-F, as was most often the case, historically. Both appear, in images discoverable on the internet, to present convincingly as female the last time anyone paid attention. Such is not often the case with individuals in a more recent surge of M-to-F transexuals. Seriously – if you’re going to go all out claiming to be a female, guys, can’t I demand that you work harder at it? You know – extensive surgical body modification, makeup, hairstyling, presenting at least the superficial appearance of being the fair delicate flower of womanhood?
The surge of F-to-M transexuals is even more disturbing. Being a teenage female in puberty is a miserable business, even more so now; battered from every side by the availability of grotesque porn, and the temptations of being validated by peers and supportive authority figures that all those doubts and stresses will go away once you take all kinds of hormones, cut off your breasts and excise your uterus, and have some surgeons build a quasi-penis from flesh sliced elsewhere on your body. Troubled teenage girls are so vulnerable to peer pressure, now that social media has turned the dial up to eleven.

There are several objections to the recent apparent surge in transsexualism. The first is that it is one of those passing and inexplicable human fads, rather like the madness in the 1980s for discovering recovered memory, and ritual Satanic abuse in day-care centers. (Oh, Charles Mackay, thou shalt be alive in this hour! What chapters you could add to Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness of Crowds!) This was damaging enough to those children and adults swept up in the madness – but it was a mercifully limited madness, in that it was not pushed energetically and universally through social media, entertainment media and by public school teachers, who obviously are either sexually confused themselves, or want to get hep with the latest trend, for various reasons, none of them indicative of sound mental health on their part. My daughter speculates that many of those celebs or semi-celebs pushing trans-ed on all and sundry are those who have screwed up their own children – if they have any children – to such a massive degree, that they want to screw up everyone elses’, so their own severely maladjusted spawn appear normal in comparison. YMMV
The second is that all this trans stuff – the surgical and the hormonal – it is irreversible. Chemical and surgical mutilation can’t be walked back. There is no ‘Oops!’ Sorry about that! We goofed – can we stitch your breasts back on?! No reversal, upon regrets about procedures that vulnerable teens were rushed into undergoing, by pseudo-authorities who didn’t really have their best interests at heart – only the notion of chalking up another number on their private scoreboard.

Comment as you wish. Is the toleration for all things trans coming to an end?

Rebellious

18. August 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Media Matters Not, Politics, That's Entertainment!

Americans – both those born on this soil and those who weren’t but who got here as fast as they could – are natural rebels, stiff-necked, stubborn, and not inclined to bow the knee and truckle to those who think they are our betters. Oh, it might not seem so in these dolorous times; too many of our fellows seem just too ready to be passive, landless serfs with an appetite for crumbs and approving notice from the wanna-be-nobility’s table, and too damned many outright want to be the nobles, or their willing henchmen/women/whatever. But a preponderance of us are not that ready to be pushed into servitude to the State – witness the drubbing at the pools that the voters of Wyoming gave to the presumed princess-heir of the landed house of Cheney yesterday. Losing an election by a 40% margin is not just the voters saying ‘no, thanks’, it’s the voters escorting the candidate to the city limits, brandishing buckets of tar and bales of feathers while snarling, ‘…and don’t come back!’
Ah well – I have long disapproved of political dynasties – the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Murkowskis, the Gores and their similar and lesser-known political ilk. The only political dynasty that was ever any good for America as republic and in the long term was that of John Adams, and that was back in the day when we all were pretty adamant that there would be no patents of nobility issued, tither formally or otherwise in this blessed experiment in citizen governance. For myself, I hated the choice I had between two scions of political dynasties in the 2000 election. What – a choice between two sons of political privilege? I think I held my nose and voted blindly, and can’t remember who for, not that it made much of a difference then or now. Although one of the two has retreated to a relatively quiet life in Texas, and the other has chosen to humiliate himself on the international stage as one of those campaigners for radical actions to oppose climate change, traveling hither and yon at great expense on energy-spewing jets.

It’s nice that the voters in Wyoming can emphatically kick to the curb a notorious carpet-bagger pol (whose speaking resemblance to Miss Piggy ought to be noted.) and whose personal portfolio has increased to an incredible degree during her tenure. Alas, cut short due to the obstinacy and stupidity of the voters – but never mind, she will no doubt flit off to some other profitable perch among the minor nobility. They do tend to take care of their own, after all.
In the meantime, we can make fun of them. It can be vicious, enjoyable fun – passing around disrespectful memes, satires, jokes and cartoons about our ruling class, pointing out their many hypocrisies, their double standards and public pratfalls. Laughter and derision are potent weapons, as Saul Alinsky pointed out in his Rule #5; “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” Think of Sabo’s painting of Joe Biden in a mask and nothing else, and a hotpants and garter-clad Kamala Harris. Consider that picture of Sec Def Austin, double-masked and outdoors, inspecting the troops – all he needs is a flowing cloak and Darth Vader’s music. We can laugh and poke fun, while the media handmaids of our Ruling Class fume and stomp their feet while insisting that it’s not funny …
Well, it is. And we are a rebellious people. Ridicule is our weapon. Along with ruthless efficiency, determination and fanatical devotion to … oh, blast. I’ll come in again. Comment as you wish.

Tech

10. August 2022 · Comments Off on Tech · Categories: Ain't That America?

It was a matter for discussion at the last ChicagoBoyz Zoom meet-up this last weekend; how the development and widespread use of ultrasound technology likely has reframed the debate about abortion, over the last two decades. Trent T. affirmed how some of his contemporaries had named their children early on in utero, already knowing the sex of the child, and were sometimes devastated with grief when the mother naturally miscarried; as devastated as they would have been if the baby died at birth, or as an infant. The baby – their child – was real to them. They had pictures in indistinct black and white; proof that their child was already a child, not just a clump of cells. The existence of the embryo, the child – becomes even clearer, later in development.
The 3-D ultrasound of Wee Jamie in utero at seven or eight months was a stunningly accurate visualization of how he would look upon delivery some weeks later – strongly-marked eyebrows, amazing-long eyelashes, curving lips that carried out the family resemblance to my daughter and myself, and affinity towards showing his feet to the observer. The only question remaining to us was what color his hair and eyes would be, once he was delivered. (The hair is light brown, the eyes at this point an indeterminant hazel. God only knows what it will say when it comes to the identifiers on his drivers’ license.) My daughter treasured those prints of the ultrasound sessions – as she remarked now and again, if something happened to savage her pregnancy, they would be the only souvenir and proof she had that her son ever existed.

This technology wasn’t available to me, pregnant in 1979 – but the first time that I heard my daughter’s heartbeat (I thought at the time that the baby was a ‘he’) – a kind of washing-machine sounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, heard through the OB nurses’ headphones – that was the day that I came to grips with the individual identity of that developing child, existing inside of me as a separate, discrete human being. The heartbeat was real. The image of an infant, in blurry black and white – wiggling, turning, showing off his/her feet, sucking his/her thumb; this is what ultrasound does. It enforces the reality of a baby. The baby is real.

I agree that this bit of medical technology, has probably had more to do with increasing a distaste for abortion than practically anything else could ever do, save among those deranged pro-abortion fanatics. (And the enthusiasm for that process is deranged – warped, savage and inhuman.) Ultrasound imagery shows a real, squirming, wiggling, live human being, floating in amniotic fluid – not a disposable clump of inanimate cells. This is the argument that pregnancy support centers have been making, as this one story suggests. The teenage pregnant mom had every intention of aborting her pregnancy, went to a pregnancy support center because they had an ultrasound capability. When she saw that she was carrying twins, she decided to carry on with the pregnancy, with the somewhat erratic support of her boyfriend, their two families, and the center itself. No, it wouldn’t have been all that easy for her and the boyfriend, falling into parental responsibilities when they were so spectacularly unprepared for them – although, inter alia, they must have had knowledge of and access to birth control, such being the widespread knowledge of such things, these days. Turning up pregnant as a side result of energetic sexual relations between a healthy young male and female surely cannot have been that unforeseen a result. That ultrasound is so effective an argument for life, and carrying children to term, even under less than optimal circumstances, no wonder that pro-abortion sympathizers like Elizabeth Warren issue frantic demands to shut them down.

I guess Elizabeth Warren and her friends hate the thought of all those baby parts not being available for sale by Planned Parenthood. Think of all those fetal cells tragically going to waste, when a live infant is delivered! Comment as you wish.

The Light of Rutupaie Going Out

02. August 2022 · Comments Off on The Light of Rutupaie Going Out · Categories: Cry Wolf, European Disunion, History, Literary Good Stuff, War

Rutupaie, the modern Richborough Castle, in Kent, England – was once the site of a notable Roman military garrison graced by an enormous marble triumphal arch visible to ships arriving in the port, a tall lighthouse, and a thriving civilian town with an amphitheater. The lighthouse and the triumphal arch are long gone, but a large portion of the circuit of twenty-five-foot-high walls still remain visible above ground. This was the terminus of Watling Streat, a keystone in the network of carefully engineered roads which covered Britain like a net. It was most likely the site of the original Roman bridgehead in the time of the Emperor Claudius, which would in large part become the province of Britannia. Rutupaie became the major port of entry all throughout the four centuries that Roman power held sway over that far and misty isle, their ships and galleys guided into safe harbor after dark by the fire atop the lighthouse.
In one of the opening chapters of the novel The Lantern Bearers, a young Roman-British soldier makes his decision to remain in Britain when the legions are finally and officially withdrawn by order of the Emperor. Having deserted his unit as they are on the point of departure for the last time, he lights the great fire atop the lighthouse, as the galleys row away on the evening tide; a last defiant fire, as darkness descends. Peter Grant, who blogs at Bayou Renaissance Man noted this week that Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels about the Romans in Britain and the long, slow, painful dying of Roman civilization there were being republished at a reasonable price in eBook. This reminded me again of my very favorite historical author; The finest and most evocative historical novel ever in English is either the Rider of the White Horse or her retelling of the Arthurian epic, Sword at Sunset. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s version, The Mists of Avalon, is overwrought trash in comparison.

The haunting element of Rosemary Sutcliff’s series, which beings with The Eagle of the Ninth and ends with The Shield Ring, is the slow dying of a civilization, and how ofttimes those people in it look around, and know without a doubt that things are not as they once were and might never be again, for all that they might do. They see the unmistakable evidence, know that their world is disintegrating bit by bit, even as the Roman-built cities, garrisons and farmsteads in Britain decay or were abandoned, in the wake of continuing invasions by the Saxon tribes from the mainland. These various characters are haunted by knowledge that the best they can do may not be enough to keep the light of Rutupaie on for another night. They fought gallantly and died bravely, holding off the barbarian hordes who came over the walls and swept the old Roman laws, culture and establishments, civil and actual into oblivion and all memory, save for the archeologist’s trowel and the writer’s art. The walls crumbled, the roads were grown over, the cities either vanished underneath the green turf, or were inhabited by people who built simple timber shacks among the colonnades and walls that they no longer could rebuild, repair, or replicate until centuries later.
It’s the notion of a dying civilization that haunts, especially in this year. One has the sense of standing on a crumbling wall, looking at the odds and knowing that even if you win for the day, tomorrow there will be another assault, and another after that. Many of us are now standing on that wall, or lighting the fire in that tower, resolving to resist the barbarian horde, but there is a single overwhelming difference. In the times that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote about, the enemies of the Pax Romana were barbarians from outside, intent on conquest, wanting land and riches for themselves, and to brutally quash anyone getting in their way. In our own time, the barbarian savages, hungry for power above all and motivated by the unquenchable thirst to destroy through famine, plague, economic destruction, and open warfare against all of those who stand in their way … are none but our own ruling elite. Comment as you wish.

Something Accomplished

30. July 2022 · Comments Off on Something Accomplished · Categories: Domestic

Actually, several things accomplished this week against some odds, like that of minding Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson while my daughter did real estate stuff. I whanged out another chapter of a project I am doing for a client, got another good chunk of work done for another client, and had a meet with yet a third client and her hired illustrator, which all went well. That first project will of necessity, take a little longer to complete, but the second and third projects will be done in a week, and by the end of August, respectively.

The one other big thing accomplished was something which I had been vaguely dreading – getting the registration renewed for my car, which has been lingering in the garage for months on end, ever since I finished paying for the restoration of the hood, since it came loose and whanged up against the windshield last October. As I was tooling along the Wurzbach Parkway at a sedate 55 miles per hour at the time, this was a rather startling event, and insurance didn’t cover it. So – out of pocket for the necessary repair, and almost as soon as I got the car back, then we had the tall stack of recycled fence materiel for the back fence rebuild blocking the garage, and of course in all that time without being driven, the battery ran low …

Anyway, even though I ran the trickle charger to the battery overnight, I was still worried that the car wouldn’t start at once, or that once I turned the engine off, it wouldn’t start again … and that even if it did, and I got all the way to the place where we prefer to have oil changes and safety inspections done, that the spreading crack in the windshield where the hood banged against it last year would be counted against passing the inspection, so that I would have to save up to get the entire windshield replaced before I could renew registration and drive the car legally again; a hassle and an expense at this point that I just do not need. I coped by not thinking about it, until I really had to think about it.

Fortunately, the car started up, as per usual, although the gas tank needle hovered just above bone dry; another project for another day – filling up the tank all the way. The car gets amazing milage. I drove all the way to Houston and part of the way back before needing to gas up again, and if it weren’t for the fact that the AC system in it also needs to be topped up again (and the moon roof leaks in heavy rain), it would be in more regular use day to day, rather than the Montero.

And more fortunately, to my way of thinking, my car passed inspection – really, I have seen cars on the road with more trashed windshields, although I don’t really know if they were legal at that point – and we got home, and I successfully renewed for another year. Like Mr. T. of the A-Team, I really like it when a plan comes together …

Out of All Patience

25. July 2022 · Comments Off on Out of All Patience · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

I read the various news and commentary about the regular police force; five full-time officers and a chief strong, and a couple of other city employees resigning in a body from their jobs in Kenly, North Carolina, in protest over the hostile work atmosphere generated through a new city manager hire. Details on this are all obscure about the personalities and specific incidences of workplace hostility involved. One can sort of fill in the empty spaces, just applying what can be deduced from the personal details and past employment record of the city manager involved, and suppositions regarding the civic employees who have resigned. That and reading the comments appended to the news stories about this interesting happening from those who seem to be familiar. All the parties involved seem to be tight-lipped about what set the whole thing off. The town council was supposed to have held a closed-door meeting on Friday to resolve the situation, but there has not been anything new in the news media that I can find.

I did not grow up in a small town like Kenly, but in a suburb on the distant outskirts of Los Angeles, a suburb so remote from the urban core when I grew up there, that it might just as well have been a small town. There was only one high school – a largish one, as semi-urban/suburban consolidated high schools go – but otherwise a semi-isolated, tight, and cohesive community, a community only cracked, dispersed and amalgamated to the larger urban core when the 210 Highway went through, making the place an easy commute to the larger city. I have since made a study of small towns, doing books about them, visiting such towns regularly, participating in regular celebrations (mostly book-oriented), absorbing local history, gaining a sense of places where everyone knows each other, or is related, even at one or two removes. Look – these places are tightly-woven with personal and familial ties. Screw around with them at your peril, as all those folk tales about the country folk and the city slicker will attest.

Even late-comers to the place must make an effort to blend in, create their own positive connections, take a key part in binding the community together, and not make themselves obnoxious. What happened in Kenly, inspiring the full-time police officers and chief, and two other city employees to tender resignations is … most unusual. The new city manager does seem to have been the one chiefly responsible for inspiring the resignations. Frankly, it takes a true gift for offense to inspire such hostility within a bare month. From the little that has made it into the various news reports, she was let go from her previous civic employment, sued for the unfairness of it all, which was denied, and then spent two years as the self-described CEO of her boutique consulting firm, which I suspect is resume-speak for being unemployed; a woman of color, you see. From the previous job descriptions and college degrees, one might suspect a committed diversity social justice warrior.

I should emphasize that I don’t know this for sure, but the speed with which she alienated city employees gives one the sense that she was, and not tactful or diplomatic about it. Kenly is roughly two-thirds white, Asian, Native American, mixed race or Latino, the remaining one third black, as of the 2000 Census, although that may be subject to change in the last twenty years. So – at a blue-sky guess here, a professional city-administering bureaucrat of color, swanned into a small town, tried to throw the racial card down … and long-term employees and citizens looked at her, and what she demanded of them, and decided that the only way to win was not to play.
Honestly, I’d guess that at this point, employees of various cities, corporations and colleges who are not of the favored ethnic or sexual demographic are looking at the racial game as played by the DEI/BLM/Whiteness-is-a-Crime-Against-Humanity-Eleventy!! as a game they don’t want to play. Just look at the declining recruitment and retention figures for the military. Not everyone annoyed by the diversity woke can afford to quit so publicly. Likely that more of the dissenters are quietly resigning, retiring or updating their resumes.
Comment as you wish. Especially if you have first-hand or second-hand insight into the Kenly situation.

It’s Called Acting, Dear Boy

20. July 2022 · Comments Off on It’s Called Acting, Dear Boy · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, European Disunion, General Nonsense, My Head Hurts, That's Entertainment!

Or so Laurence Olivier is supposed to have said to Dustin Hoffman, during the filming of The Marathon Man, when Hoffman got a little too deeply immersed in his role.
It’s acting – convincingly pretending to be a person you are not; experiencing events and emotions on the stage or screen that the actor might or might not have really experienced. It’s pretending, in the service of storytelling. In our current over-the-top state of extreme wokery, any kind of illogical insanity seems to rule; in this latest example, an American soprano singer, one Angela Blue, has made a great show out of quitting an opera performance, because of her objections to another opera performance and singer in the same venue. Angela Blue objected vociferously to Russian soprano Anna Nebtrebko singing in the title role of Aida, while made-up to appear as … gasp … Ethiopian. (A production design originated by the late Franco Zeffirelli, as an aside.) Angela Blue, who is African-American, terms it as ‘blackface’, although comparing serious grand opera to the buffoonery of vaudeville minstrel shows of a century ago is considerable of a stretch. What adds an interesting twist to this, is that the opera performance which Angela Blue walked away from was La Traviata, and her role as Violetta – a French courtesan, and in the original concept, a woman not of any color save lily-white.

To put it finely, Ms. Blue is perfectly OK with playing a white role, while throwing a hissy-fit over a white woman playing a sort-of-tan role. Quel surprise.
OK, then. This does bring to mind the great kerfuffle over casting of the US production of Miss Saigon, some three decades ago, which eventually died down when it was pointed out that a hard-and-fast across-the-board limiting of roles that an actor or singer could play to only that of their own ethnicity (or sexual orientation) would place severe limitations on those roles which an actor or singer could legitimately perform. Black opera singers, like Angela Blue would be limited to singing Aida, or Porgy & Bess. Opera singers of Japanese ancestry would have Madame Butterfly, Indonesians or Indians would have The Pearl Fishers and Lakme, singers of Chinese ancestry would have Turandot – and that would be that. Black actors looking to perform Shakespeare would have Othello and not much else save maybe in crowd scene. Performing anything Wagnerian would be totally out – only Germans could apply for those roles. Oh, and Hamilton would have to be totally re-cast; sorry, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Discuss or comment as you can bear it.

Heatwave

13. July 2022 · Comments Off on Heatwave · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, European Disunion, Technology, World

Yes, there is a heatwave going on in Northern Europe this week – or at least, to them it’s a heatwave. To those of us who live in Texas, it’s just a normal summer, with temperatures in the 90s and reaching three digits. Supercilious Europeans, Brits and Canadians, and lunkheaded Americans like perennial tween know-it-all Taylor Lorenz are forever chiding us about our excessive air conditioning in homes, government buildings and offices, little recking that basically, most of the United States is on the same latitude as the Mediterranean and North Africa – and without efficient air conditioning, large swathes of the southern states would just plain old be unlivable – and no, in the South it’s not a dry heat, but a soggy and humid exercise in physical torment. So I do feel for those suffering Europeans and Brits, I really do. My brother and sister and I spent the summer of 1976 in Britain, which turned out to have been one of the hottest on record, rather like the heatwave this year. We – accustomed to So-Cal summers didn’t at first really grok how unaccustomed the British public was to this kind of summer heat, what with the grass in the parks dying for want of water.

Us: Don’t they, ummm, water the grass regularly? We came from a place where lawn-watering was essential – no, it usually wasn’t necessary in Britain, where the rain fell regularly like clockwork, as it would later on in that summer, when the weather got back to something like normal for that part of the world. It was so hot that we were actually served ice in the soft drinks. Smart-ass younger brother to waitress in a Brighton fast-food place called The Great American Hamburger, regarding a lonely ice cube swimming in a glass of Coke: Gee, aren’t you afraid you’ll be struck by lightning, putting ice in the drinks? Teenage waitress, deadpan: Yes, I live in terror of it. Exchange in another pub, between two elderly habitues over pints. #1: Guess I had better drink this before it evaporates. #2: Arrrrr … then t’would rain beer… It remained a mild puzzlement to us, why everyone was going round with their parched tongues hanging out and turning all shades of pink sunburn, while clad in wrinkled and slightly out of fashion summer clothes. It seemed like quite a normal summer, for us.
For myself, I have only lived in two places which were endurable in the summer, but for existence of window units and/or central air. One of them is Texas, the other was Seoul, ROK, which compounded the misery by being bitter cold in the winter, with storms that blew in, straight off Siberia. Seriously, Willis Carrier ought to be sanctified, for his work in making life bearable in large chunks of this dirtball.

Granted – there are also large parts of the dirtball which are normally perfectly comfortable for humans in the summer – most times. California, where I grew up, was one of them; temperate, cooled off at night, lived in houses with large shady trees all the way around, and windows situated to catch whatever cooler breeze was going. Athens, Greece was the same way; although it did get hot in the blazing sunshine, my apartment there had tall windows, high ceilings, and take advantage of a refreshing ocean breeze. Sit in the shade, caressed by a wandering breeze – all hunky-dory. In a place where the local architecture makes allowances, with tall windows, shady verandas, and easy airflow, a warm summer is endurable. For a year in Sacramento, I could get by with fans, blowing in the cooler night air, and closing up the windows and drawing the curtains. Ogden, Utah was a slightly different kettle of fish – it was hot in the summer, but dry enough that a swamp cooler did the trick. Northern Japan was almost exactly the opposite: relatively mild. High seventies in summer, which would have been endurable, but for 100% saturation. A glass of ice water would sweat a puddle of water around it, almost equal to the contents of the glass, imperfectly-dried clothing developed mold spots, and two minutes out of a cold shower, one was dripping with sweat. Only one summer in Spain, where I spent six of them, was truly awful, for heat.
I do truly hope that the experience of this summer will make Euros and Brits a bit more understanding of American need for air conditioning, although likely they will forget, as soon as the heatwave passes. As for Taylor Lorenz – I dare her to go without AC, first. Double-dog dare, as an example to us all.
Discuss as you wish, and can be amusing.

A Nice Haul

08. July 2022 · Comments Off on A Nice Haul · Categories: Domestic

The first thing we saw when heading out to walk the dogs and Wee Jamie this morning – well, after the big trash-hauling trucks from City Public Services all staged to pick up the bulk tree trimmings – was an orange sign for an estate sale up the road, address unspecified. We took a zig from the regular route into the extension to the neighborhood and found the estate sale. My daughter took Wee Jamie with his stroller, and I held the dogs on their leashes, across the street in the shade and waited for fifteen minutes while she cased the sale. One of the items for sale – for which they were taking bids was a 1960 Studebaker Lark, in very good condition. (The auction for that car will close tomorrow, I think, and with luck they will get north of $15,000 for it.)

One of the neighbors whom we encounter frequently on walks lives across the street from the estate sale and filled us in on the retired couple whose estate it was; a retired military chaplain with an invalid wife. The husband was the main caretaker for his wife, until he had several heart attacks last year, as well as breaking a hip. The wife contracted Covid through visiting her husband in the hospital and passed away – so the family found a smaller place (most likely assisted-living from what I gathered) for the chaplain and moved out his most valuable stuff last week. The house, Studebaker and the remaining furniture and bits and bobs were all being sold. I overheard several of their neighbors and friends talking about this; they seem both to have been very well-liked. The house and yard were immaculate. The items on sale were in excellent taste and condition, and priced very reasonably, which doesn’t always happen. (The items and furniture that the family kept must have been quality indeed, if what was left to be sold was judged superfluous to needs.)

My daughter spotted some attractive bits of Wedgewood and some Danish Christmas plates, a small cut-crystal brooch, some bits of art and Christmas ornaments – very obviously, the chaplain and wife had been stationed in Germany; Japan too. As for me, with the rest of my month carefully budgeted out – I was determined to resist temptation, which lasted until I laid eyes on a matched pair of Blanc du Chine lamps, with an insanely reasonable price on a piece of masking tape stuck on the shades. I have loved the look of the classic mid-century Blanc du Chine ever since I was stationed at Misawa in the late 1970s, and they had dozens of them in various sizes and shapes, for sale in the BX annex. Alas, as a baby airman on basic pay, I could only afford the smallest, and least expensive of the lot – a mere 8-inch-tall boudoir lamp which has followed faithfully in my household goods ever since. A couple of years ago, I found a larger Blanc di Chine lamp at another neighborhood estate sale, without a harp and shade, the wiring so decayed that I had to take it all apart, hand-wash and install a new socket and rewire it entirely. (The former owners had been hoarders, and the inside of the house was indescribably cluttered. The people running that sale said they had filled three dumpsters before they got to the sellable goods.)

So, home with a matched pair of lovely ginger-jar Blanc du Chine lamps and some miscellaneous other stuff – and because it is now our rule after the experience of that estate sale at the hoarder’s house – if stuff comes into the house, an equal quantity of stuff must go out, to Goodwill, if nowhere else. My daughter loaded up the back of the Montero with the two table lamps which are now judged excess, and a box of other stuff. All the Blanc du Chine lamps live in the master suite – I would be heartbroken indeed, if the cats or the dog managed to break any of them, since it appears they are even more expensive now, then when I first drooled over them in the BX annex at Misawa AB.

Advanced Incompetence

07. July 2022 · Comments Off on Advanced Incompetence · Categories: Eat, Drink and be Merry, European Disunion, Media Matters Not, World

The grim and cynical judgment is that advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from deliberate malice. I am certain that grimmer and more cynical commenters that me have long since concluded that the advanced and mind-boggling incompetence of the Biden Administration is indeed indistinguishable from deliberate malice, at least as far as results are concerned. The staggering increase in the price of gas at the pump is the one thing that almost everyone, save the impossibly-out-of-sight-rich are feeling. When the price leapfrogs twenty cents a gallon from one day to the next, it excites notice from ordinary people, who need to drive to the jobs that they still have. And what is the barely sentient vegetable in the White House, or the individuals who are manipulating his strings doing about all that? Essentially nothing, save lip service and pointless gestures.
They want gas prices to go sky-high. No, that’s the take-away. In their fantasy-world, having the price at the pump be equivalent to prices at European pumps will move us all gently, painlessly, and inexorably towards driving electric cars, (and living in high-rise prole cubes in big cities, and eating protein derived from bugs) never mind that the tech and infrastructure to support that kind of thing isn’t even remotely possible, now or ever.
Nope – the Biden administration wants us unbiddable red-state, fly-over proles to suffer, to grind us all into the dirt. They want this, they are panting for it, orgasmically. Mostly because we don’t and won’t do what they order us to do, and so we must be punished for disobedience.

Sad it is to be living in this decade – watching the great and daring experiment of a democratic republic – by and for the ordinary citizens, instead of a small, powerful elite, being taken down by those who have been the privileged beneficiaries of sixty and more years of peace and security; spoiled and corrupted children in a tantrum, destroying it all from within. It’s all too easy, lashing out, little knowing or caring that a high degree of social trust in a society can be readily destroyed and almost impossible to rebuild. When cities become crime-ridden hellholes, and the grocery store shelves empty out because the trucks aren’t running (because fuel is impossible to find and afford) and the farmers have had to cut back because fertilizer, insecticides and fuel are in short supply – it will be too late for anything but regrets.

It’s not much better in other countries, either – if this and similar reports have any substance, farmers in the Netherlands are in open revolt over government edicts dictating reduction in number of farms by a third in the next eight years. This in the wake of predictions that the war in the Ukraine will set off a world-wide famine in any case; which makes this the best time in the world to pour more gasoline on a bonfire. This move apparently has something to do with reducing nitrogen pollution – and also cutting back on the availability of meat, poultry, and dairy for ordinary people. This is going over about as well as can be expected – a third of the people in agricultural enterprises being told that they’re going to be thrown out of business on the basis of sketchy science, and consumers being told to subsist on gruel and bugs. The elite don’t care, secure in their protected bubble of privilege. They want this disaster because of the environment or something, and care very little for the results that everyone else can clearly see coming. Discuss as you wish. We might as well, since the major news media outlets seem to be avoiding any mention of famine, revolt, burgeoning civic unrest and violent crime committed by the favored constituencies.

The Hill To Die On

20. June 2022 · Comments Off on The Hill To Die On · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, My Head Hurts, World

I swear, I have never been able to understand how the loud and proud Capital-F official feminists made the ready availability of abortion the hill (for the pre-born fetal humans, mostly) to die on. Yes, I’ve pondered this in blogposts many a time. The 19th century suffragettes certainly were what we would now cast as pro-life, and so was a modern iteration, IIRC. (I used to get their newsletter.) Why that one single aspect, out of all the others which would have a bearing on the lives of females; extended maternal leave and benefits, quality childcare … practically any other concern other than that of abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy could be a rallying ground for those affecting an intense interest in matters of a particularly female orientation. This, when birth control in so many forms (and for male and female alike) is readily and economically available. This is not the 19th century anymore, not even the first half of the 20th,. Truly, it is a mystery why this particular cause and no other animates the radical fem-fringe. I can only surmise that many of the radical and early feminists had abortions, felt horrifically guilty about it all and wished to drag other women into that particular hell with them as a matter of solidarity.

I am myself old enough to have known other women – my peers, mostly – who did for a variety of reasons, decide to take that route. I understood that they had reasons they felt were valid and I sympathized without approval. A woman who is pregnant and for whatever reasons, emphatically does not want to be – has a problem, a problem for which all the solutions are painful. I did not judge then – but did feel the weight of their decision to go with whatever they felt to be the least painful. No matter how you slice it, with abortion, you are cutting off a potential life – a viable heartbeat, little fingers and toes, a tiny face with eyelashes and a decided character, even in the womb. So I have always approved of an supported those various enterprises which reached out a helping hand to the inconveniently-pregnant; anyone or any office which offered medical help, moral and actual support and encouragement to a woman who was inconveniently pregnant. That was putting good intentions where they mattered; into actions which would offer an alternative to abortion.
Now, it seems that such crisis pregnancy centers and assistance to uncertain mothers and fathers is a bridge too far for the radical pro-abortion advocates, and one of the more radical fringes of such have declared open war on such centers. Vandalism, destruction of offices, threats of violence, an order to cease operations or else … and it is my judgement that even if such threats are carried out … it will not have the desired effect, as much as the Jane’s Revenge activists may hope. So – My Body My Choice: Just Make the Choice That We Have Autocratically Decided That You Should Make. (Too long to fit on a protest sign or a bumper-sticker, though. But that’s what Jane’s Revenge is essentially saying.)
This is one of those stark moral issues for the pro-life advocates and volunteers, and not one which will be backed down from. Saving the lives of the unborn children, and redeeming the lives of their mothers, one by one – is a moral cause, just as the cause of the abolition of slavery was for active abolitionists was in the America of the 1840s and 50s. It was an issue upon which no compromise could be made, a stand from which no threat would dissuade committed abolitionists of that period.
Comment as you wish, on what might happen next, in this regard.

Cozy Little Home

19. June 2022 · Comments Off on Cozy Little Home · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local

This must be my month for noticing cozy and modest little homes appearing in media – last week it was a quaint little cabin in the mountains redone by Melissa Gilbert and her husband as their personal refuge. This week it is a shed on a small ranch property near Fayetteville. The owners inherited the property from grandparents. While sensibly saving up what they need to reno the main house, they spend a year and a mere $16,000 on fitting out a shed as a tiny temporary home for themselves and two young daughters. The shed itself dated from the 1980s and appeared structurally sound – it had even been insulated, but lacked plumbing and electricity, and was just a single room inside, approximately 280 square feet. So they set to work, doing the labor themselves; partitioning off the space inside to one living room and kitchen, with a bathroom and bedroom at the back. They built on a generous porch which added about a third more living space, replaced the windows, put in an air conditioning system – and have been living in it happily for more than a year.

I’d guess that most of that $16,000 went for the plumbing, electric and HVAC, the new vinyl windows, and the kitchen cabinets. Most of the other construction materials were sourced from the ranch itself, gained from tearing down an even more decrepit old barn and reusing the wood beams, planks, and the front door, which hardly needed any more work than replacing the glass panel in it. It was a lovely demonstration of what one can do on a small project, with the help of friends, and making use of what materials come to hand. I do hope that they will also document progress on renovating the main house; at any rate, when that second and larger reno job is done, the family will have a lovely little guest house.

I honestly wish that more builders were interested in building developments of small – say 800 square foot or less houses, of the two bedrooms, one bath sort. Those small starter houses might sell for a much more reasonable, affordable price. But there are all sorts of economic and political pressures not to do so, mostly associated with economic costs and civic authorities not wanting to allow any development which might soon descend to slumhood, never mind that home owners tend to be rather more careful of their property than renters.

Cloward Pivening

15. June 2022 · Comments Off on Cloward Pivening · Categories: Ain't That America?, On The Border, Politics

Once upon a time in the mad 60’s a pair of mad lefty (but I repeat myself) socialist sociologists refined a strategy for bringing about the blessed socialist utopia by overloading and bankrupting the welfare system. This, they confidently hoped, would crash the capitalist system and bring about the longed-for socialist utopia. Essentially, they drafted the poor and unprivileged into an army demanding services which the state ultimately could not provide; somehow, this would crash the system and bring about radical social reform. The whole thing sounds rather like the Underpants Gnomes theory of economics or the cartoon showing a pair of white-coated scientists examining a complicated mathematical sequence on a chalkboard with a notation in the middle of it which says, “And here a miracle happens.”

Somehow the miracle would happen! One can be forgiven for suspecting that progressives in our federal government are having a serious go at Cloward-Pivening the entire nation by deliberately overloading and crashing every existing support system, from energy production to transportation networks, law enforcement and the courts. Deliberate plot, or merely the result of towering incompetence at every level in the federal bureaucracy? While sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from active malice, I’m coming down more and more on the side of active and deliberate malice in all sectors.

The powers that be in the Biden administration actively want gas to be at $10 a gallon, just like Europe, where in the space of a half an hour drive you can be in another country or two (or three). Sky-rocketing inflation and gas prices at the pump have their own part to play in this farrago of fail. They want the grocery store shelves empty and the economy crushed. They want ordinary citizens to freeze or swelter in the dark (depending on the season), thinking this will force adoption of sustainable energy sources, which are anything but reliable. They want to see our urban centers burn, while local law enforcement stands around with their finger in their ear, for fear of being victimized by headline hunting racial agitators or backstabbed by a district attorney who will let the miscreants out with a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek almost the minute they were arrested.

The results of our elections are sometimes questionable, our national news media can’t be relied on for a true accounting of events, and it is perfectly obvious that the administration of justice is decidedly biased, when participants at a rowdy protest in the nation’s capital eighteen months ago are still locked up awaiting trial, whole those who were caught red-handed burning, looting and otherwise wrecking property in other cities were let go without much of a penalty. They want to see small independent businesses go bankrupt and have us purely dependent for goods and services on a handful of big corporations – because it is easier to control half a dozen national corporations, than half a million small business. They want Western forests to burn, and California orchards and farm country to wither up for lack of water – not the wineries though, because they are super important to someone like Nancy Pelosi. They prefer that homeless drug addicts make our cities dangerous and feces-paved places. They prefer to welcome a tidal wave of unscreened illegal immigrants. They want to see our profitable industries outsourced to places like China. They want to see our elementary schools teaching nothing students to hate each other based on the color of their skin, with a side order of sexual deviancy. They want higher education to forego teaching the classics of Western literature, or history, or anything else which might clue students into the responsibilities of citizenship, and what an experimental and daring form of government that a democratic republic was as first conceived two hundred years ago. (They seem to want, in fact, a kind of modern feudalism, with powerless and obedient serfs, ruled by a handful of nobles connected by marriage and kinship bonds. It’s Cloward-Pivening, all the way down. It’s happening because they want it to happen this way.

They want the collapse, so they can be left, squatting on, and ruling over a pile of ashes. They don’t care, they really don’t care, preferring to rule in Hell than be a citizen in heaven.
Comments, suggestions, observations?

A Weekend Marketplace

12. June 2022 · Comments Off on A Weekend Marketplace · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Local, Texas, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

So, my daughter was roped into representing the brokerage she is with, for a day-long outdoor market event earlier this month. I will not say anything more specific about the event, the location of it, or the purpose of the event itself, save that it was absolutely the most horrifically mismanaged and disastrous event which she has ever been a part of, and oh, gosh, have we done a lot of them. Not as many as professional vendors following the weekend markets will attest, but yes, we’ve participated in enough of them to be able to distinguish a well-organized and well-run event from a dumpster-fire, floating down a flooded riverbed.

Yes, efficiently well-run community or event market has certain commonalties, upon which vendors and exhibitors have come to depend. Like, the event organizer will let us know exactly what we need to bring, or if such items will be supplied (usually as part of the required table fee.) The organizer will also let us know through providing a map, exactly where to set up our pitch, what time to set up and break down, where we can park, and are available by phone call, email or just by simple physical presence, when it comes to dealing with problems which naturally arise. Trash cans, portapotties/bathrooms also abound, in readily locatable areas. The very best markets which we have participated in also featured representatives from the managing organization or committee who also took a tender care of the vendors – circulating among the vender booths, ensuring that we had water, lunch, someone to spell us if we were alone and needed a bathroom break. Oh, and … sufficient publicity for the event itself which drew enough participants and generated enough in sales to be totally worth participating? Oh, yeah. All this, and some of the very best even included a free lunch for vendors, and raffle tickets … but never mind.

The event earlier this month incorporated practically nothing of the above. The organizer was not much in evidence for much of the day and couldn’t be raised by cellphone or message to deal with those problems which arose. This persistent unavailability gave rise to much annoyance. The place, so says my daughter, looked half-derelict and deserted, the landscaping neglected, and mildly litter strewn. Not an inviting prospect on the whole, although if kept maintained, the grounds and building could have been amazing.

A food truck depending upon electricity from the venue had no luck at all, and had to send at the last minute for a gas generator, as the feeble trickle of electric power proved insufficient for their needs in providing for customers … customers who didn’t show up anyway. My daughter did report that she and the other vendors could make use of the bathrooms within the permanent venue building, but that the plumbing of the place didn’t allow for TP to be flushed down the toilets. An archaic thing that I haven’t seen since we were living in rental property in Spain, where the plumbing system proved to be unable to digest toilet paper. We got used to this, of course – but it seems a strange quirk of a system in an American venue in this present day, no matter how old the house. Finally, by late afternoon, my poor daughter and her co-agent were basically sitting in a place without shade – which would have been endurable if there had been any kind of crowd at all for the venue event.

Which there wasn’t. And that was the final insult – hardly any crowd at all, as publicity for the event seemed to have been minimal.

Finally late in the afternoon, after suffering from a mild case of sunburn, my daughter and her co-worker decided to pack up and leave an hour before closing time. One of the other vendors had also left before that time. They brought around their cars from where the vendors had been told to park, rolled carefully across the venue grounds, packed up and were about to leave when the venue organizer finally showed up, and cussed them out a blue streak for carelessly driving through the grounds, and leaving early. (Copious amounts of alcohol may have been involved on the organizer’s part, as this person seemed to be oblivious to the lack of crowd, or coherent and completely sober.)

My daughter looked at the all-but-deserted venue, shook her head and left, while the event organizer fulminated. Perhaps as was fortunate, the organizer didn’t know their names, and may indeed have forgotten the name of the brokerage itself. Participation in that goat-rope was on the part of someone else at the brokerage who wanted to get more exposure. We’ve passed on the contact details of organizers of regular markets who are more on the ball, organization-wise.

Academic Malpractice

03. June 2022 · Comments Off on Academic Malpractice · Categories: Ain't That America?, Literary Good Stuff, Rant

The post at Legal Insurrection (link) says in part, that the goal is to “…to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”
So basically, this is an administrative rubber-stamping a passing grade on the report cards of black students who can’t be arsed to attend class, behave properly as students when they do, or turn in required assignments. Frankly, one wonders why such students even bother with school anyway, if they are so vehemently disinclined towards the life intellectual, but truant law and free daycare for such parental units as they have probably account for it, as well as money for butts in seats on the part of the school itself. At this rate of scholastic malpractice, urban schools might just as well hand out high school graduation certificates as if they were Pokemon cards, one to a customer and save themselves time and effort in the classroom. Any serious education of pupils appears as merely a happy afterthought to a means of employing large numbers of administrators, assistant principals and teachers whose union membership is vastly more important to the powers that be than imparting knowledge to that handful of rare-as-hen’s-teeth pupils who seriously want to learn.

This particularly unfortunate notion to enforce the mystical quality of “equity” on students of color will backfire of course. Future employers, associates, neighbors and professional will regard those students of color who hold such useless bits of paper as worthless, illiterate, and dumber than dirt, which will no doubt make those public-school products feel even more disrespected, resentful, and inclined to casual criminality and general uselessness as citizens than they already are. Just call me Cassandra, if you please.

Honestly, home school looks better and better all the time, as many otherwise well-intentioned, well-paid and ambitious-for-the-children parents discovered during sessions of remote learning and home lockdown, exactly and to their vast disgust what kind of sex-ed and racial-theory lunacies were romping untrammeled through the classrooms.

Which brings me to higher education – and wondering why the heck any intelligent eighteen year old with a strong grasp of cost-to-benefit ratio even bothers, especially if they are not of color, are male, straight, and genuinely interested in the great intellects and events of the Western canon. What with dropping a requirement for scholars of the classical ancient world to be conversant in Greek or Latin, to consider the poetical sonnet form, and practically every other great writer in the English language to be tainted with a pollutant called white supremacy … well, really. Why go to college at all, if one is imbued with a love of language and literature along that line? Why not just spare all the lectures by overpaid and resentful woke academics, (pissed that they haven’t been able to create something just as transcendent and enduring) and simply take the autodidact path on your own time? It would certainly be cheaper and a lot less stressful. (And there are always the Great Course series and others of that ilk.)
Discuss as you wish.

A Farrago of Fail

27. May 2022 · Comments Off on A Farrago of Fail · Categories: Domestic, Good God, Local

It was hard enough to wrap the mind around the shortage of infant formula, and how a recall and recall-caused shortage which began months ago, only blew up in our National Establishment Media, and by extension, the current administration in the last week or so. I suppose that if you aren’t living in a household with a baby present, it was easy enough to miss out on the whole tense business of – will there be formula on the shelves – how many cans can we get – and what on earth do we do if we run out? It didn’t help that sanctimonious cows like Bette Midler and divers others began smugly suggesting that mothers breast-feed, once the matter bubbled to the surface of the national conscience. Why thank you for that heaping helping of the screamingly obvious – it had somehow managed to escape our notice. Now that the National Establishment Media is belatedly interested in the matter, we discover that the contamination in question which kicked off closure of the manufacturing location likely originated elsewhere than the factory. We also discover that the FDA dragged their feet on approval to re-open. Huh. Imagine that. A low priority for the inspectors, or a deliberate attempt to add just that much more of a ration of misery to our lives, now that gas is over $4 a gallon in Texas where it comes straight from the cow, and higher yet in other less fortunate localities.

A friend of Sarah Hoyt’s was of the opinion that things like the formula shortage and the high gas prices (which down the road will affect the costs of everything that has to be transported) were deliberately generated to just nudge the public a little, make us uncomfortable and agreeable to whatever those administrative geniuses had planned – you know, smaller houses, electric vehicles, not owning anything and existing as happy little serf-proles obedient to our betters. But the administrative geniuses mis-calculated. They are just coming to the horrified realization that all their planned little nudges are spinning wildly out of control. They can’t even begin to figure out how to reel it all back in, or how we will react to the catastrophe they have generated. Where will this all be by next year, when we have burned through last years’ harvest and gas is $10 a gallon or more? They don’t know, and likely that scares them out of their minds.

Speaking of a farrago of fail, the Uvalde school shooting … I can’t quite decide what is more awful; the posturing over the bodies of dead fourth-grade kids by vile opportunists like Beto O’Rourke (better known now as Beta O’Dorke) or the carelessness on the part of civil and ISD authorities which let it all happen in the first place. With the caveat that Uvalde is not a town which I know as well as Fredericksburg, Goliad, Gonzalez, Giddings or New Braunfels – I know for darned certain that after other school shootings, and the bloody massacre at the church in Sutherland Springs several years ago – there was absolutely no basis for believing that a school shooting couldn’t possibly happen in a small town, like Uvalde. We’ve done school events in Giddings several times; and yes, we had to sign in with picture ID, shown to school administrators sitting behind a Plexiglas panel, and escorted through a secure door into the corridor leading to the classroom where we were to do a talk about creative writing. That a teenage nut-case with serious anger issues and excessively expensive weaponry could waltz into an elementary school through an unlocked back door, and then do his worst while the local PD sat around outside … At the very least, the Uvalde PD officers are not going to be very popular with their neighbors for the foreseeable future.
Also – I believe that it will come out that the Uvalde killer was a well-known problem child, and that he likely had an extensive juvenile record as a hell-raiser. So, when are we going to do something about common-sense nut-case control? Or here’s a thought … since the death toll of innocents in Uvalde was on par with a normal AKA violent weekend in a place like Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit or Baltimore … let’s talk about confiscating the weaponry from the inner-city gang-bang element. Or is that just politically unspeakable?
Discuss as you wish.

Home Comforts

27. May 2022 · Comments Off on Home Comforts · Categories: Domestic, Home Front

I was mildly amused to read this story, of how Melissa Gilbert, once the kid TV star of Little House on the Prairie has retreated with her current husband to an old hunting cabin in the Catskills, to live, as they say, the simple life. It certainly looks simple enough – a modest small house in the country, which she described as dilapidated and run down until she and the husband began renovating. While interesting that she pleads the joys of the simple life, away from Hollywood and still has been featured in several stories in the Daily Mail over the last few days, I do have to admit that pictures of the place and the interior do make a strong case for her current simple and modest lifestyle. The interiors look cozy, cluttered with vintage-looking and modest knickknacks which must mean something sentimental to Ms. Gilbert and husband. The furniture looks like the random odd bits that one can pick up at a country auction, inherit from family and friends, find on the curb, or buy at a good thrift store. It’s not to my taste, which is a little more spare, and oriented towards Craftsman/Shaker/country cottage – but it’s as far from the expensively designed House Beautiful/Architectural Digest kind of interior as can be imagined; the enormous spaces, sparely staged with furniture that looks to have never been used, bookshelves with few or no books on them, sterile spaces of walls hung with expensive statement pieces selected by a set designer – as impersonal as a five-star luxury hotel suite. Ms. Gilbert’s new digs actually look like a real home, where real people live – not a movie set, or a empty home made up to look good for quick sale in a booming real estate market.

Ready to Ride

17. May 2022 · Comments Off on Ready to Ride · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, World

In the apocalyptic visions of St. John, the third of the four Apocalyptic Horsemen is Famine, the other four being Pestilence, War and Death. Death is always with us, one way or another, and we’ve had pestilence, AKA the Commie Crud for the last two years and counting, and War, in the shape of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine … so why not Famine, just to round out the set? The four horsemen usually go hand in hand anyway. Famine is almost a guarantee, as the Ukraine was a major wheat exporter, and now it seems that chemical fertilizers will be in short supply as well. David Foster has already posted a story about this, and other commenters have chimed in regarding the woes of the supply chain and the potential for famine in places and nations which had been able to move past such misfortunes, because of technological advances … advances now in danger.

The political and economic disaster in Sri Lanka resulted from their president’s ukase that agriculture must go 100 percent all-organic. Which anyone paying attention at all could have and probably did predict would lead to crop failure and poverty for those classes lowest on the economic ladder. This bad example does not bode very well for the fans of organic and sustainable farming here in the United States, but they are probably now on record as insisting that it just wasn’t done right. The power elite in Sri Lanka are in hiding, as justifiably outraged mobs of citizens chase them down in the streets and push their expensive cars into rivers. Not much of this is being shown on our own media, as near as I can see – probably because the media powers-that-be and are in bed (literally) with our own power elite – don’t want to give any of the rest of us ordinary citizens ideas about doing the same.

The feeling that I am getting, reading posts like this, at Bayou Renaissance Man, is that although we in the US won’t see for real Biblical famine, we will for certain see empty shelves at the supermarkets, like we have in a spotty and erratic fashion all during the last year: we have seen empty shelf space for things like dried pasta, for canned hominy, frozen French fries and dozens of other items which formerly would have been available consistently, week to week. It’s not just baby formula being unavailable; just that has been the most notable grocery item unavailable or in such short supply as to have to be rationed. It’s a certainty now that foodstuffs will get more expensive in the near and foreseeable future, if they even are still available. So – tighten the belt as far as grocery-shopping goes, stock up on shelf-stable items and lower your expectations when it comes to menus. And plant a garden, if at all possible.

What are you doing, or suggest that we do, in the event of the third horseman going for a good long ride across the continental US? Discuss as you wish.

HVAC Woes

13. May 2022 · Comments Off on HVAC Woes · Categories: Domestic

It has been almost a year since the day after Wee Jamie was born, a day that I spent at home because the AC ceiling unit had overflowed the drip pan, saturating and collapsing part of the den ceiling. The trusty local company which installed the whole HVAC system in the first place almost ten years ago had to reinstall a new evaporator coil as the existing one was ruined, a new line connecting the outside condenser, compressor and fan, the coolant line had been dinged somehow during the siding install, and a drain to the nearest outside flower bed. At that time, a year ago, they suggested making a full sweep and replacing everything, including the outside condenser, etc., but I winced at the cost and opted for the minimal fix. And the darned outside condenser/compressor/fan gave out entirely over the Mother’s Day weekend, in the face of an expected heat wave. Sigh. You’d think that something like an HVAC system maintained by the installing company could have lasted longer than a decade, but this is Texas; great for men and dogs but hell on women, horses and, apparently, HVAC systems. We had no HVAC drama for the whole year until last weekend. (The condensation drain used to get plugged pretty regularly, until it was re-routed – to our exasperation, and that of the techs, who used to have to show up every couple of months.)

The good thing is that my credit rating is recovered to the point where I can get favorable terms for a better-quality system – quieter, smaller, and more efficient … plus they promised to fix an ongoing problem with the front bedroom, which has always been either hotter or cooler than the rest of the house. The other good thing is that I had finally paid off two loans for previous work, which gave my budget some (fleeting) elasticity. The third good thing is that we got several hefty discounts – one for having been loyal customers for a decade, another for referring a good friend who bought a system from the company based on our good word, still another for senior citizen (hah!) and veteran, and a fourth hefty rebate from the energy company. It is my profound hope that with the new system – and taking into consideration the new siding and the windows – that I really will see a substantially lower energy bill this summer. The bill for April was the pits; we only ran the air conditioning for half the time, or two days out of three, but the kilowatt hours consumed were nearly as much as the hottest month around here, which is August. Possibly the condenser/compressor/fan failing had a lot to do with this. I hope so. They topped up the blown-in insulation, which ought to help with the bills.

Another very promising thing is that the outside unit is about a third the size of the previous one. It mounts to the side of the house, rather than on the ground on a small pad, which keeps it above the dirt and all, and allows a bit more of my yard to be used, without that big hulking square thing taking up precious garden real estate.

And the final bit of good fortune? About a year ago, I scored a deLonghi portable AC unit for the price of a customer review, knowing that we might have a need of it someday. It didn’t have enough oomph to keep the house cool, but it did chill one 15 x 11-foot room quite nicely, It turned out well that we had that portable, for there was a problem with the new smart system, in that it didn’t actually work, at first. As my daughter remarked, ‘never mind about a smart system that doesn’t work, what about a moron system that does?!’ We’ve been miserable all week, waiting first for the installation, and then for the last in a series of expert techs on Friday to sort out why the brand new out-of-the-box modules – apparently some connection came unconnected in transit from the factory, such a rare occurrence that the regular install technicians didn’t expect to see, and the factory support functions are in another time zone entirely, so someone working on our unit in the late afternoon or early evening was SOL when it came to expert human tech support. Praise be, the installation supervisor arrived first thing this morning, and went over the inside and outside units, reprogrammed the whole system, and for the first time in a week, it’s comfortably cool in the house.

And the contractor who promised to do the back fence actually arrived first thing this morning – so although my bank account will be cleaned out for the next week to pay for work done – the back fence and gate is under construction even as I write. At long last; we’ve been waiting on that since early in March!

Wee Jamie, The Wonder Grandson

11. May 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic, General Nonsense

My grandson, the child of my only child, will be a year old next week, and if there is a more loveable, adored and indulged baby-almost-toddler around, I would like to meet him or her. (See, I’m not a biologist but I can tell the difference. My father, who was a biologist trained us all well in that sciencey sort of thing.)

He is close to weighing twenty pounds, and when standing on his flat, tender little baby feet – and he wants most urgently to stand – the top of his head comes to my daughter’s mid-thigh. When he was delivered three weeks early by emergency c-section, I was a bit concerned because his arms and legs were so thin, the flesh on them rather flaccid. He was just large enough and scored high enough on the APGAR test that he wasn’t consigned to NICU (neo-natal intensive care) and so could home with us two days later. In the year since, Jamie has firmly plumped out, with little dimples on the back of his hands where his knuckles are, and dear little indented rings around his wrists, elbows, and knees. He will lose that baby fat when he begins to walk, though. My daughter remained roughly the same approximate size and weight from the age of 18 months to four years – she just lengthened out, grew lean and tall.

He is going to be tall, when he is grown to man’s estate and shall be very proud and great. He has a head of feathery light-brown hair; sometimes we see blond highlights in it, sometimes rather more auburn, and it curls very slightly back of his ears. He has rather strongly marked eyebrows and ridiculously long eyelashes, but the color of his eyes themselves is hard to judge – blue-green, blue-green-hazel? It depends on the day and the lighting. His nose gives promise of eventually being rather a beak, but as to the mouth, everyone says that he has lips like mine and my daughters. Otherwise, not very much of a family resemblance at all; a gamine face, which likely will change when he is an adult. He is not one of those children who keeps basically the same face for their life, like Granny Jessie or my brother JP, both of whom are recognizable from earliest childhood through to middle or advanced age. He smiles now, openly and at practically everyone, and of late has begun to giggle and laugh.

Wee Jamie is not one of those timid, hard-to-approach small children. When we take him shopping, he is ready to smile at anyone who smiles at him, although he has been known to stare at some strangers with direct and unsettling intensity. Otherwise, a very placid, confident, and happy baby, who rarely cries full-on, unless in pain (rare) or fright (rarer still. His godmother speculates that it is likely he is that way because my daughter and I readily comfort him and attend to his needs. One year, under our belts – now for the next twenty…

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