Author Archives: Old Jules

Best laid plans

Posted on December 13, 2014 | 16 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh7xHDE5j-g

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

1951 I fell madly in love with a song on the radio:  Trumepeter’s Lullaby.  So naturally around 1955 when Central Grade School began scouting around for kids who wanted to play instruments in the band I announced, “I shore do!”

But half the boys lining up to sign wanted to play the trumpet.  Probably the glamor of it looking so similar to a bugle, which we’d all seen in John Wayne movies, along with various war movies.  And Frank Sinatra’d been a trumpet player in something to draw our attention.

Okay.  My parents assured me I could learn to play Trumpeter’s Lullaby on a trombone as well as Anderson played it on a trumpet if I worked hard.  Besides, someone they knew had a trombone the kid outgrew and I could have it for the price of a little oil and Brasso.

So I worked myself something awful on that trombone for the rest of grammar school, right on up into Junior High Band.  Learned to read music as long as  it was following a bass clef lead.  And damn me, never could play anything as well as I could play taps or reveille.  Sounded really good on a trombone.

I did learn to play Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread.

And I did a fair job on Under the Double Eagle.

But taps, reveille, Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread, and Under the Double Eagle does not a band member make.  Never could bring myself to learn anything else and finally Mr. Jackson, the band director suggested I try choir.  Move on to greater horizons, sort of thing.

So hell, I did.  Never joined the choir, but I spent a good many years singing Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin Bread until it became rude to do it for other reasons than my voice.

Likely as not if I live long enough I’ll take up the trumpet, though.  I never cared for that damned trombone.

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America

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Asylum seekers you’ve come to the right place!

Posted on December 10, 2014 | 4 comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty#mediaviewer/File:Statue_of_Liberty_7.jpg[/embed

Send me your physicians, your engineers, your entrepreneurs, your cast-off politicians.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty#mediaviewer/File:Statue_of_Liberty_7.jpg

Hi readers.  Thanks for the visit.

Probably most of you have noticed the US has become an asylum.  What the hell.  I suppose it’s to be expected.  This morning I perused Yahoo News long enough to discover Israeli soldiers beat a Palestinian Minister to death because he was protesting the latest US sponsored land grab Israel’s been doing since the summer slaughter at Gaza.  They’ve gobbled up a lot more territory on the West Bank, as well as in the half of Jerusalem they don’t own.

Nothing new there except me pointing out it’s the US sponsoring it all by sending them all those billions of dollars and megatons of weaponry.  So you and I are complicit in the slaughter, robbing and rape of Palestine by Israel.

However, what really surprised me is the uproar defending torture of prisoners and holding them without due process of any kind for years, decades.  It’s taken as an opportunity for self-celebration by news announcers.  “America is awesome!” trumps “Jesus H. Christ!  We need to quit torturing people and provide them with due process or we’re leaving ourselves open for a royal screwing!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PgIKAukheo

Yep, welcome to the asylum.

Jeanne told me about a news item – they’ve found ruins and written documents in Massachusetts, she says, authenticating a Muslim settlement 500 years before Columbus.  I’ll be interested in chasing that down, but the strong man for Turkey made a news release sometime in the 1990s making a similar claim.  Evidently Columbus made an observation somewhere in his writings that they’d found a Mosque in Cuba.

Heck, probably they were the shock troops over here looking for something to blow up but got here ahead of schedule.  Makes sense to me.

I hope that last bit doesn’t give Israel any ideas based on the Hebrew writings on Hidden Mesa dating back so far it took modern scholars to identify precisely what they were and said.  Next thing you know the Israeli army will be bombing schools and hospitals in Albuquerque preparatory to sending settlers to New Mexico because ‘they owned it once’.

Might as well.  Hell with Congress and so much of the government already being dual-citizenship Israeli they’d probably end up owning it again.

But that’s life in an asylum.

Old Jules

 

 

4 Comments

Posted in America

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Tough call, this Ferguson thing

Posted on December 5, 2014 | 7 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The Internet’s buzzing with opinions about the original Ferguson, MO, incident, and the rioting afterward.  Everyone feels qualified at this stage to have an opinion.

I don’t have an opinion, but here it is.

I don’t like cops.  I think they are a gang of bullying thugs attracted to the job because of personality deficiencies.  I believe they see themselves as a ‘brotherhood [gang] and use phrases such as ‘authority figure’ to explain to themselves why nobody likes them.  But deep down they know why.  They demonstrate the truth of this most profoundly when one of them gets killed on the job.

However, under the current structure of this society it’s a job that satisfies a necessary need in society, probably marginally keeping things from going completely off the rails by other gangs of thugs taking over and doing even worse.

Such as the gang of thugs who are setting fire to homes and businesses in response to Ferguson, opportunistically running off with stolen booze, television sets, anything they can take and run.  Here’s what a couple of black men have to say about all that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR465HoCWFQ

For beginners, the store camera just before he was killed proved to my satisfaction the dead youngster was a bullying thug and a thief.  If he’d run into you or run into me anywhere adversarial such as a dark alley he’d happily make us sorry some cop hadn’t offed him sometime earlier.  In a year or two when he went to prison [as he was certainly going to do] he’d have been big enough to be on the happy end of the raping of his cell mate.

So the issue isn’t whether the world is any better off or worse off with him dead.  I’m personally satisfied there are people all over the place he didn’t live to occupy who are being spared a lot of pain and heartache as a consequence of his demise.

So the issue is really not him getting killed.  Nobody would be rioting if he’d been one of the far more numerous black men being killed by other black men.  Nobody is lamenting those, partly because a huge percentage of them might be suspected without prejudice to have ‘needed killing’ in the same sense this one did.  Gangsters, street hoods, living and behaving in a way to invite getting shot in a war zone.

So the real issue is cops.  Police officers coldly and deliberately killing blacks, not all of them as needful of being killed as this one.  And getting by with it.

My opinion is that whenever a black kills a black it’s an equal offense to a black killing a cop, a cop killing a black, anyone else killing a cop or black.  It needs to stop.  Cops need to be thrown under the bus whenever they kill anyone and it’s not clearly self-defense [against an armed suspect].  Same as a black gets thrown under the bus the instant a cop dies.

And blacks need to belly up to the bar and take some responsibility for the way their kids are behaving out there on the streets.  Same as white people need to.  One of the ways they need to do that is to make certain the black folks getting shot are the right ones to eradicate all this street shooting.  Whether they are cops or gangsters.

But what the hell do I know.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America

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Stolen valor? Give me a freaking break.

Posted on December 4, 2014 | 1 comment

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Gangs, whether it’s Hell’s Angels, Banditos, cops or [now] Army Navy Marine and Airforce volunteerees, tend to be jealous whenever some non-member sports their colors.  A tattoo artist acquaintance in Austin, Texas, started keeping a Thompson submachine gun under his mattress when he learned he’d tattooed a non-Bambino with a Bandito badge of honor, for instance.

But now what with the Valor-this and Valor-that being bandied about by the ‘thankyouforyourservice’ clubs, the big issue of the day is what you can see down at the VA hospital any working day.  People sitting around lying to one another about what John Waynes they used to be.

However, this is mostly a different breed.  Guys claiming to have been Navy Seals or Army Snipers getting all riled up because some dumbass down at the mall is pretending to be a soldier.  Sick enough the dumbass wants to do it, but how needy are those Seals and Snipers who haven’t suicided yet over the serious bullshit going on inside their heads?  They’ve got to go around looking for dumbasses to out to jack themselves up into something with a life worth living?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNaCaBO6vs

Probably there needs to be a little Ferguson platoon burning down the local recruiting offices.  This stuff is getting all out of hand.  Those guys are beginning to believe their own bullshit.

Now back in the day when I was John Wayne I wouldn’t have put up with all that crap by either side.

Old Jules

1 Comment

Posted in Adventure, Government, Military

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Something time forgot

Posted on December 4, 2014 | 5 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Back in the 1960s browsing around book stores a person used to find 33 1/3 LP records of poets reading their own poetry.  I bought several and always enjoyed listening to Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Archibald MacLeish and several others.  Those poor old LPs were awfully scratchy and beat up by the time cassette tapes came along and I converted those I could.

But toward the end of LP-days along came Rod McKuen and I suppose made everyone a bit shy about admitting they listened to poetry.  I’m telling you now I listened to part of a Rod McKuen LP once, so shoot me for a dumbass.

Anyway somewhere back there my tapes ran away with a fancy machine designed to play them and it’s been a long time since I’ve heard Frost, MacLeish, Penn Warren, or TS Eliot, among others.  Missed it considerable.

But here in my dotage in Olathe, KS, there’s a lady who works at the County Library who was once an English Major.  She takes delight in getting me whatever the library has on almost anything.  I’ve consumed books on low sodium cooking, for instance, and am currently reading some new Terry Pratchett.

So lately when I got hankering to find some MP3 recordings converted from those mentioned naturally she was my database.  The bad news is a lot of it is still in libraries somewhere on vinyl, never converted even to tape.  You can find my favorite MacLeish on Amazon on LP for $4.77 used, but nothing even on tape.  Or you can get it Interlibrary loan from NY Public Library on LP.

Anyway I got Frost converted from CD to MP3, along with an assortment of other CD anthologies and spang sent them back to the library, ordering more.  And today I’ve got another stack  she brought home last night.  TS Eliot and The Spoken Arts Treasury Volume 1 [6 CD] of a large variety of poets reading their own poetry if they were still alive when recording devices were invented.

I also have a 2 CD set of the Mills Brothers, 1931-1968 I’ll be converting to MP3.  Truly looking forward to hearing it.

But the technology is moving so fast by the time I get them on MP3 probably something will come along assuring they’ll be lost to history some other way.  Heck, there aren’t enough people interested in Archibald MacLeish, Carl Sandburg, to justify someone commercially to preserve them.  Not anyone after cassette tapes came along.

Ezra Pound spent the years of his life after WWII in confined exile because he got so enthusiastic about Italian fascism, entirely because Il Duce supported the arts.

If poor old Ezry had recorded all those endless cantos he penned from 1945 until he died I suppose it would be one hell of a treasury to convert to MP3.  I’m probably the only person on the planet who wouldn’t listen to it.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2014, Art, Poetry

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Brain Drain: Charley Whitman’s brain is missing!

Posted on December 3, 2014 | 12 comments

Most of you won’t remember Charley Whitman’s shooting spree off the Texas Tower.  And most of you also won’t remember Kinky Friedman’s song about it.

Hells bells, most of you aren’t going to be impressed the ex-Marine, ex-Eagle Scout’s brain is wandering around somewhere unaccounted for.    We’re not talking about Dr. Wossname, Frankenscense here.  These are the times that clone men’s souls if we don’t keep close track of where they get off to.

Leave it to the University of Texas to lose the only brain with any historical significance ever to set foot on the damned campus:

About 100 brains missing from University of Texas

Associated Press
6 hrs ago
The University of Texas at Austin is missing about 100 brains — about half of the specimens the university had in a collection of brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde. © Nick Koudis/Getty The University of Texas at Austin is missing about 100 brains — about half of the specimens the university had in a collection of brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde. The University of Texas at Austin is missing about 100 brains — about half of the specimens the university had in a collection of brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

One of the missing brains is believed to have belonged to clock tower sniper Charles Whitman.

“We think somebody may have taken the brains, but we don’t know at all for sure,” psychology Professor Tim Schallert, co-curator of the collection, told the Austin American-Statesman (http://bit.ly/11R7vym ).

His co-curator, psychology Professor Lawrence Cormack, said, “It’s entirely possible word got around among undergraduates and people started swiping them for living rooms or Halloween pranks.”

The Austin State Hospital had transferred the brains to the university about 28 years ago under a “temporary possession” agreement. Schallert said his psychology lab had room for only 100 brains, so the rest were moved to the basement of the university’s Animal Resources Center.

“They are no longer in the basement,” Cormack said.

The university said in a statement that it will investigate “the circumstances surrounding this collection since it came here nearly 30 years ago” and that it’s “committed to treating the brain specimens with respect.” It says the remaining brain specimens on campus are used “as a teaching tool and carefully curated by faculty.”

The university’s agreement with the hospital required the school to remove any data that might identify the person from whom the brain came. However, Schallert said Whitman’s brain likely was part of the collection.

“It would make sense it would be in this group. We can’t find that brain,” he said.

Whitman’s 1966 rampage at the University of Texas killed 16 people, including his mother and wife.

The 100 remaining brains at the school have been moved to the Norman Hackerman Building, where they are being scanned with high-resolution resonance imaging equipment, Cormack said.

“These MRI images will be both useful teaching and research tools. It keeps the brains intact,” he told the newspaper.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/about-100-brains-missing-from-university-of-texas/ar-BBggiWW?ocid=ansnewsap11

A brain, though, is a terrible thing to waste.  Hopefully someone out there will make better use of this one than the last two owners.

Old Jules

 

 

12 Comments

Posted in 2014, Education, Human Behavior

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Exploiting Us Veterans

Posted on December 2, 2014 | 5 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I’ve been fascinated reading articles at the Veterans Today site.  It doesn’t have much about veterans and their issues, but it uses the name to give the impression the material found there is respectable.  And sometimes it is.

However, the Alpha Male of the site is a blustering old guy who always wanted to be John Wayne and Agent 007 when he was a kid.  He got old and in his dotage he discovered he was a Marine sniper [naturally] in Vietnam, in addition to having been an intelligence ‘expert’ later on.  Knows a guy who manufactures military looking firearms in his garage and Duff tries to pedal them on the Veterans Today website.

I’ve mentioned before we vets are horrible liars.  One hell of a lot of us are.  Especially when we’re discovering the John Wayne we were in our youths, and our CIA activities later on.

Anyway, Gordon Duff’s the bulonious chief and he’s got a number of similarities hanging around trying to be like him.  Jack Heart’s a columnist who also used to be John Wayne and he’s so tough he’s said he’d like nothing better than to get Oliver North, whom he’s tougher than, into a locked room.  Ex-Gyrene, Heart, who remembers he hasn’t lost a fight since he was fifteen years old.

Then there’s Stew Webb.  Columnist on Veterans Today and host of Veterans Radio.  Another guy who used to be John Wayne and Agent 007, but who now resembles a cartoon caricature of an old bum with no teeth.  Lately he’s been trying to sell the Ebola scare and a cure-all of expensive nano-silver [colloidal doesn’t work because you can make it yourself for pennies].

Then there’s the weirdest one of the lot, Jonas Alexis.  Not a veteran so far as I know.  Just a man who shares ethnicity with the current lame duck President of the US.  Alexis is interesting because he hates Jews.  Not Zionists.  Jews.  Blames all the problems of the world on them.  I’m not talking about SOME of the problems of the world.  Old Jonas Alexis believes Jews are behind every imaginable thing that’s wrong with the planet earth and the people on it.

Hell, Jonas Alexis believes Jews are behind the Ferguson riots, for gosh sakes.

Here’s this black man, devout Roman Catholic, PHD in some damned thing or other, who regularly puts up columns on a VETERAN website denouncing Jews, blaming them for degeneracy, pornography and the overall downfall of civilization.

Then there’s a dickhead named Preston James.  Another rediscovered John  Wayne/Agent 007.  His masthead shows him in a pair of shooting glasses and muffs.

But that ain’t all.  Duff, Heart, James and some of the others are evidently believers in the Urantia Book, or some facsimile thereof.  They frequently post updates on all the aliens running the show in Washington, the world, and discuss how Israel is tied in with alien lizard people.  [I mightn’t have that precisely correct, but I’m in the ballpark].

The commenters are almost all Jew haters and Jew baiters, same as Alexis, and a couple of them asserted in response to a Thanksgiving Day post about the history of Native Americans, that hardly any Native Americans ever existed, certainly a not enough to get it ‘taken away from them’.  I’ve not said these people are smart, though many claim to be ‘insiders’ in ‘Intelligence’.

Almost all the commenters and columnists believe 9/11 was done by Israel, that the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag also done by Israel, and the Sandy Hook thing didn’t happen.  Almost universally they also believe the German Holocaust also didn’t happen.

Gordon’s fond of saying, “You can’t make this stuff up!”  He’s right.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/ is where you’ll find it readers.

Old Jules

[Incidently, a middling good case can be made Sandy Hook didn’t happen.  And I sure as hell agree with anyone who says Israel needs to get back inside its legal borders pre-1966 and quit stealing real estate belonging to the Palestinians.  And quit killing Palestinians while they’re at it.]

 

5 Comments

Posted in 2014, America, Human Behavior, jews, Military, Veterans

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Immigration disambiguated

Posted on November 25, 2014 | 4 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

As a 1950s kid in Portales, New Mexico, the barber shops always had a bunch of old guys sitting around educating one another [and me] about how many Germans they killed personally during the Big War [WWI], along with how bad chlorine and mustard gas stuck in the gullet.

That’s where I also learned [before Sputnik 1 put that one to sleep] how the Good Lord wasn’t going to let men put anything into orbit around the earth.  How the Bible proved it by the way He destroyed Babylon and made everyone speak different languages.  You don’t hear a lot of that stuff anymore.

But another thing a kid heard a lot in those days was, “My granddaddy fought the Indians for this land.  I’m damned if I’m going to let [fill in the blank] do thus and so.”  Sometimes it was the Federal Government, sometimes the Communists, sometimes it was some potential foreign aggressor he wasn’t going to let get by with it.

A lot of their grandaddies also fought the Yankees for this land, but nevermind.

For most purposes those old guys didn’t find it convenient to mention a lot of their granddaddy’s fathers also fought the Mexicans for that land and took it away from them at the point of a gun.  Pretty much everything from Texas to California with a few other places thrown in for good measure.

That’s a fair synopsis of how immigration works.  Our ancestors came in and took it away from anyone who stood in the way of them.  If someone tried to stop them they dragged them out of their houses and killed them, burned the houses down and stole their livestock.  Just the way the Hebrews did to the folks who tried to keep them from stealing their lands in the Bible.  Just the way they’re still doing it to their neighbors in Palestine.

For a longish time when North America needed white people to fight the Indians, and fight the Mexicans. Live in hovels to scratch out bare livings on hardscrabble farms, coal mines, log forests, sweatshops making textiles, steel, tools, clothing, kitchen appliances, build railroads, immigration was groovy.  They Statue of Libertied the concept.

Nobody’d figured out yet you could just send the jobs to the pestholes those people were coming from and import their products without having to put up with the people.  Everyone could stay here, close the borders and sell hamburgers and insurance policies back and forth to one another or be cops and firemen.

So now it’s only the damned immigrants of earlier generations someone’s going to have to figure out what they can do about.  Sure, a few sneak across the borders still, and a lot of Asians get let in because we need people who can read and write and cypher.  But all in all the immigrants causing all the trouble in the US today are the ones who got here sometime before WWII.

Somethings going to have to be done about those bastards.

Old Jules.

 

 

 

4 Comments

Posted in 2014, Government

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Disambiguating Gratitude

Posted on November 24, 2014 | 7 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I’m sure all of you are preoccupied, sneaking around every waking moment putting together all the things you’re thankful for in your lives so’s to not forget anything come Thursday.  I don’t want to interrupt that, but I’d just like to throw in a suggestion:

Try to keep it simple.  Try retain your sense of taste and perspective while you’re acknowledging all the things you’re grateful for.  Sure, you’re grateful for not being downrange of any presidential war of the moment, naturally you’re glad you’re not a Palestinian and the neighbors aren’t likely to bomb your home, set fire to the nearest hospital, nor come kick you out of the house so’s good Baptists can move in.  Of course you are.

But you don’t have to say all that.

Truth is you’re almost certainly dwelling on how damned lucky you are to have legitimate citizenship in this country because it took in the destitute downtrodden souls including your ancestors without asking a lot of questions instead of patting them on the back and sending them off to starve in the place they escaped from.

And naturally you’re thanking your lucky stars the multi-national corporations haven’t sent your particular job to some third-world cesspool where people work for a nickle a week.  Probably because you’re a cop or other government worker and they haven’t figured out how to outsource the scowling clerks doing their fingernails and talking on phones down at Department of Motor Vehicles to Chinamen.

All I’m trying to say is keep it simple this Thanksgiving.  Be glad nobody at the table is being held in a US penal institution at the moment getting anally raped by other Thanksgivers.  Be glad you’ve got a motor vehicle in the driveway you’ve never produced enough of anything during any decade of your life worth the sticker price of it.  Be thankful you’ve got at least another year of life ahead before all that Japanese radiation forces you to wonder whether all those nuclear power plants  were all that great an idea.

Maybe it’s a good time to really bundle up on Thanksgiving:  “I’m grateful for everything that’s ever happened to me in this lifetime.  I’m grateful for everything happening right this moment.  And I’m grateful for everything that is going to happen to me from now until I croak.”

That way you’ll have plenty of time to sort out the specifics without boring yourselves to tears.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in America

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Esophageal reflux miracle antidote

Posted on November 21, 2014 | 6 comments
One of the two brands I've used with outstanding success.

One of the two brands I’ve used with outstanding success.

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I promised yesterday that I’d share something I can attest to from personal experience to lift your spirits if you’ve got a goozle with a relaxed sphincter.  When that gorge of hellfire shoots up all the way into your nostrils it’s no fun.  Especially when you’re already following all the rules the medico community gave you to keep it from happening.

I discovered this somewhat by accident when Jeanne picked up something called, “Digestive Enzymes” because I was sleeping in the recliner because the medication wasn’t doing the job for me.   The brand wasn’t the one above and it wasn’t the veggie version, but the reflux seemed reduced or gone enough to cause me to believe it was helping.  When the bottle was gone I quit and the reflux returned.

So out of hunger I had her pick up whatever she could put her and on quickly of the same genre.  This one worked also.

So you have anecdotal antidotal evidence that in the case of the ugliest goozle in Christiandom, this stuff helps.

I take as many as a dozen per day, certainly one after each meal.  Then after the evening meal I take another every time my stomach reminds me it’s still there and ruminating on the ill treatment I gave it this lifetime.  Until bed.

Then, every time I wake to take a leak I take a Serrapeptase tablet to dissolve as much scar tissue as possible.  The stuff I got because I didn’t know about digestive enzymes.

Good luck.

 

 

 

6 Comments

Posted in Human Behavior, 2000's

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