Author Archives: Old Jules

The importance of being insignificant

Posted on August 15, 2013 | 7 comments

N90172a

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

President Jimmy Carter was scheduled to visit Fort Hood.  The First Cavalry Division [my old unit in Korea] was to stage massive war games and tank maneuvers and culminate the affair with a chemical substitute for a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon.  Because the President was going to be there, FAA closed down the airspace over Fort Hood for civilian air traffic.

Pissed my old buddy Phil Washburn  

Afterlife of One Hero – Sex, Violence and Crazy Love

  and me off something awful.  We were taxpaying citizens.  Who the hell did they think they were telling people they couldn’t fly around not bothering anyone watching how our tax dollars were being spent?

So when the day arrived we gassed up the old Cessna …. 100+ F on the runway, and began the long climb outside the forbidden airspace.  Burned up a lot of avgas and an hour getting up to 8000-9000 MSL.  Clear day though, and the temperature became comfortable somewhere above 5000′.

We circled at the edge of the airspace boundary watching the specks of gathered tanks and massed troops a few miles to the north waiting for the show to start.  Suddenly, hundreds of roostertails of dust obscured miles of landscape as the tanks charged forward.  Then the sky below us filled with helicopters.  Wow!  Wowowowowow!

I gradually eased us north until we were almost over the action, but still far enough south so’s we weren’t trying to see straight down, kept circling.  Powered back enough to hold the altitude, savor the cool, and watch what a major wartime battle must be like viewed from the air.

Finally, toward the north beyond all the tanks the substitute battlefield nuke sent up a heluva pile of smoke and fire into the sky, rising rising rising until we were looking up at the top.  It kept rising.

Turn off the lights.  The party’s over.  The roostertails behind the tanks had all faded, everyone down there was taking a break, having a drink of orange KoolAid or something, we reckoned.  The helicopters were headed away where ever helicopters go when the shooting stops.

Time for us to get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge before the high sheriff and POLice come gunning for us.

I pointed us back toward the Killeen airport and as we neared the edge of forbidden territory I shut down the engine, pulled up the nose to stop the propeller windmilling.  The old Cessna had a 20:1 glide ratio, so we were a long while circling over the airport just listing to the whisper of the wind over the surfaces of the plane.

I’d intended to push the nose down to re-start the engine when I got on final approach, but I’d never landed dead-stick and figured this was as good a time as any to do it.  Got the numbers and came to a dead stop 50 feet beyond them, restarted the engine and taxied over to the FBO under the admiring stares of everyone who never landed an airplane dead stick on a public air strip. 

Naturally we did a lot of bragging at the FBO, and a lot of people were shaking their heads in various attitudes of disapproval, horror, and awe.

Hell of a fine day to be an outlaw.   I recommend it.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 1980's, Adventure, America, Flying, Government, Human Behavior, Military, Police, Politics, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Transportation, US Army

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On Civil Disobedience

Posted on August 14, 2013 | 13 comments

N90172a

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

In 1983, after I’d been parking my old Cessna 140 at the Georgetown, Texas airport for several years I was suddenly the focus of a lot of questions from other pilots.

“Gene [the fixed base operator] says you don’t have a pilots license.”  Boiled down, that was the question.  “He says he’s going to turn you in to the FAA.” 

I could see this might cause a problem.  I’d logged 500 hours pilot-in-command in my old 1947 Cessna, but I’d never been signed off for solo flight by a flight instructor.  I’d flown from Texas to Savanna, Georgia and back sleeping under the wing, carried passengers, chased cows, but I had never jumped through the hoops required by the FAA to become a licensed pilot.

Now someone had ratted me out.  No  way Gene could have found out about this unless someone dropped the dime on me, and anyone who told him did it knowing he was a sniveling rat who’d turn in his mother for a burned out license tag light just for the feel good.

Whew.  Going legal was never part of my program.  It was a complication and it would lead to other complications of legalities I’d been ignoring.  Getting annual inspections on my plane every year, for instance.

A guy named Tom Dixon, whom I’d done some scary flying things with had recently gotten his instructor ticket, so I got him to sign me off for solo flight, went through the various navigation requirements, hood time, studied the FAA manuals, took the written test.

I’ve told on another blog entry here somewhere about the FAA Flight Examiner in Austin who gave me my check ride.  About what he said when he examined my logbook.

But in the end I was a legal private pilot. 

As nearly as I could tell it didn’t make an iota of difference.

If I had to live my life over I suppose one of the few things I’d change would be learning to fly at an earlier age and never going legal.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1980's, Adventure, America, Education, Flying, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Texas, Transportation

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What’s so great about being sane and smart?

Posted on August 14, 2013 | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

The cats have been expressing some doubts lately about my sanity and insensitively observing I also ain’t all that smart.  As happens from time to time.  Seems to run in cycles when they’ve been a long while away from towns and cities where they can observe sanity and average intelligence.

When they’ve lived in, or visited towns and cities where they’ve been able to observe the ‘average’ mental conditions representing sanity and the average US human IQs of 100 at work, they lighten up on me.  For them the illusion of a better life and lifestyle associated with human sanity and average IQ loses a lot of glamor when they’re surrounded by it.  While the gulf between me and sane, and smart, take on something of an ideal.  A condition more to be aspired to than what goes on where sanity and average intelligence prevail.

The problem is those cats are brainwashed by sanist and IQist elitist propaganda, even out here.  They pick it up by words, phrases, value judgements when Gale or the neighbor up-the-hill come to call, and it gradually seeps in, trumping their own experiences and observations.  Same as happens, only more so, to the people in town who are submerged in it.

The only way to put a sea anchor on the illusion that sane and smart are somehow to be preferred to the life they live is to lock them up in the RV and take them to town for a looksee, I figures.  Give them a taste of the cat of averagism.

And if they keep hectoring me I’m sure-as-hell going to do it.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Education, Solitude

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Niaid: “So why aren’t we being more vocal about all this?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 | 8 comments

Naiad dawn2

Niaid:  Why aren’t we trying to get some help on it?  Sometimes we might want to sleep late or we might be busy at sunset.

Me:  Proselytising and zeal are consequences of an erosion of faith.  Nobody needs to shout from the rooftops, “Hey everyone!  The sun’s going down this evening.  The sun’s about to come up!”  Nobody on earth does that because they have faith it’s going to happen.

Niaid:  So why do we do it then?

Me:  Of respect.  A demonstration of our faith, tipping the figurative hat to Truth.    We don’t need to recruit anyone to the cause because we know it’s already taken care of.

Niaid:  Then why do they do it on other matters they have faith in?

Me:  I said it before.  Erosion of faith.  Think about it.  The ancient Jews were never evangelical.  They didn’t need to be.  They had complete confidence in their God.  But when Christianity came along, the situation for Christians became an entirely different problem with a different solution.  They were the new kids on the block.  They were mostly Jews.  They’d spent their entire lives being indoctrinated to the Jewish faith.  They needed numbers.  Groups of other people believing the same as they did to help boost their own confidence what they believed was actually true.

Niaid:  All zealotry is from an erosion of faith?

Me:  Every time.

Niaid:  Patriotic zeal?

Me:  Think about it.  Before the Civil War they weren’t posturing and flag waving.  They knew what they were and mistrusted the people running things, but they never doubted what they believed themselves to be.  But after the Civil War the whole question about what this nation is took on new meaning.  It needed bolstering.  Parades.  Shouting from rooftops.  Fireworks. 

Niaid:  Needed it why?

Me:  They needed it to take the minds of the defeated half of the country that they’d been forced at gunpoint to be a part of something they fought hard to separate themselves from.  After the Civil War the country never again had faith in itself because everyone in it knew the premise the nation was founded on was violated.  Dead.

Niaid:  So the reason we pray Old Sol up and down is our way of saying we know it’s going to come up and go down?

Me:  Yep.  And we know damned well it doesn’t need any extra votes to force it to do it.  We know it will come up the same,  whatever Christians, Jews, Muslems, and anyone else might do in their praying trying to stop it.  We’ve got right on our side.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Communication, Government, History, Human Behavior, Spirituality

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Hydrox: “So why can’t I hear Old Sol talking?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 | 4 comments

hydroxwindow2

Hydrox: We pray him up every morning, pray him down evenings.  I hear one end of all these conversations you have with him, but I never hear Old Sol saying anything.

Me:  Once again, it’s your romantic mode of viewing reality.  You’re only sensing what’s immediately apparent, not seeing the underlying form.

Hydrox:  I have to see the underlying form to hear what Old Sol says?

Me:  Think of it this way.  You look across the meadow and see trees with birds in them.  And an inch in front of your eyes you see a grasshopper.  You have an a priori knowledge the movement of those birds and that grasshopper jumping are happening at the same time.  But they aren’t.  What your eyes tell you is now is a microsecond earlier for the birds than the grasshopper because of the speed of light reflecting off both, arriving at your eye simultaneously.

Hydrox:  You’ve lost me.

Me:  Your mind filters what it sees with a priori knowledge.  You can’t hear Old Sol talking because you have romantic, a priori knowledge Old Sol doesn’t speak.  You’re not able to sense the underlying form.  It’s the same reason the people who read this blog wouldn’t be able to hear you talk, can’t hear cats talk.

Hydrox:  Well I’ll be damned.

Me:  Think of it.  People in the Bible used to hear God talk.  Adam and Eve, Abraham, Job, Moses, they were hearing in the Classical mode of reality.  Underlying form.   They can’t hear God speak anymore because they’ve gone by necessity into the Romantic mode.  Their minds filter out what God says, because in the modern world if they allowed themselves to hear the kinds of things God said they’d get themselves into a pile of trouble.

Hydrox:  How do you mean that?  People hear God talking all the time.

Me:  Only when God says things they won’t get in trouble hearing and obeying.  God might be telling people all over the place they have to sacrifice their kids, the same way he told that to Abraham.  But you can’t go around hearing God telling you to kill your kids, nor anyone else the way God used to do.  Telling people to smite other people hip and thigh.  Stone them to death if they screw around, masturbate, don’t follow the rules.  People today who hear God telling them to do things of that nature are generally believed to be insane.  Especially if they go ahead and do it.

Hydrox:  So if I can rid myself of this stupid, romantic way of looking at reality I’ll be able to hear what Old Sol’s saying?”

Me:  Yeah, but you’ll need to keep it to yourself or people will think you’re crazy.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Nature, Science, Spirituality

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Turnbuckles – The Final Solution

Posted on August 11, 2013 | 2 comments

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

carrier and box 1

A guy over in Rock Springs built this platform to fit into the hitch receiver out of scrap iron for me.  Another guy threw in the junk toolbox and bolted it into the platform.  Cost for the whole shooting match was too insignificant to believe.

And once I had it I could carry an el cheapo 2.5 ton floor jack to ease my concerns about future blowouts.  But carrying that floor jack home in there showed me the hitch receiver doesn’t have the moxie to keep the thing straight and level.  By the time I got home it was listing a few inches on the side the floor jack was riding.

carrier and box 2

I studied on it for a day trying to think of every possible solution.  I had a set of tiedown turnbuckles and clamps from a roof rack carrier I knew someday I’d find a use for.

carrier and box 3

Voila!

carrier and box 4a

Ran cables across the top of the bumper and attached them to the RV frame.  Pulled that mama back up level with the bumper slicker than greased owl-scat.

One of the nice things about this thing is that I can trailer it, along with other containers when I want to pull a trailer, leave the trailer behind and put this into the hitch receiver when I want to slum and go spartan.

And always have a floor jack along to do the heavy lifting.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Survival, Transportation, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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Clean laundry and civil discourse – Satanist style

Posted on August 10, 2013 | 4 comments

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

Going to a coin laundry with the RV’s an entirely different experience compared to the various times in my life when I considered hanging around watching clothes tumble something akin to hell.  Just knowing there’s a fridge out there with cold tea, milk, or ice water at a reasonable price helps.  A comfy place to stretch out, a selection of books half-read.  Lawn chair if I want to use it.

But before I decide which way I’m going to enjoy my laundrying I look the place over.  Sometimes it’s worth the hard chair to allow surreptitiously watching the people sharing the place. 

So this time I carried my stuff inside, tossed it into a washer near the front door, and casually allowed my eyes to look everyone over while I walked to the back for quarters.  Sauntered back to the machine.  Several lower-financial-drawer women, several younger couples, and a few old guys.  Mostly ignoring one another.

But I noticed a scrawny old guy wearing a Vietnam War Veteran cap watching me as I fed quarters into the machine.   So when I finished I took a chair as far from him as I could get but still see my machine.  Guy’s wearing Vietnam War Veteran caps aren’t part of my repertoire of wanna-get-acquainted.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to do the ‘bored-people scan’, opened my book, read a page, put it down.  Twigged to the fact nobody in the place would meet his eye, and he was trying to get eye contact.  I figured, “Oh jeeze, this guy’s been here enough so everyone wants to avoid the nuisance he makes of himself.”

But he was focusing more attention on me, working up to saying something, or coming over nearer where I was sitting.  I groaned and stood up, stretching, to go out to the RV, head off anything he was thinking.  Too late.

I turned to the door and he caught my eye.  “Hey!  You’re a lefty!”

“Um.  Yeah.”  Hell.  How’d he happen to notice that?  Whoopteedoo conversation starter.  He got up and headed to the door with me.

“It’s been a chore, hasn’t it?”  Two of us standing in the shade of the overhang.  Me fidgeting to break loose and sprint for the RV.

“What has?”

“Going through life left-handed.”

“Not when I could find a woman willing to sleep on the right side.”  Figured I might as well clarify my sexual preferences in case that was what was coming down the pike.

A few minutes later it came out he was a supply clerk in DaNang during the Vietnam fracas.  Tough gig.  Whoopteedoo.  “So what the hell’s the hat all about?”

“It’s because of my religion.  People around here don’t like me because of it, so I try to put my best foot forward.  Vietnam Vet buys me an edge.”

I shook my head, remembered getting cornered by the guy preaching Urantia outside the library in Grants, New Mexico.  Wanted to be my new best friend.  Real pain in the ass I never broke free of as long as I lived in Grants, always encountering him. 

I could either brush the guy off even though he was hungry for talk, or I could grit my teeth, be polite, and hear what he wanted to tell me.  Turned out he’s a Satanist.

“Whaaa?  A Satan worshiper?”

“No.  We don’t worship Satan.  That’s just something Christian preachers claim we do.”

At least I don’t have a dog in THAT fight.  “Well, hell.  Better than being an atheist, I reckons.”  I really didn’t want to hear this crap.  “Nice talking to you, but I need to take a nap.”

I left him standing in the shade, careful not to look back.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Communication, Education, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Senior Citizens, Spirituality

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Scientists are going to have to do something about this

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 6 comments

Hi readers.  I don’t know whether you’ve heard about this yet, or not, so I’ll fill you in.

The creatures on Zeta Trianguli Australis, HR3384, HR1925, Beta Trianguli Australis, 85 Pegasi, and Rho¹ Cancri are all really pissed off about how this Vietnam war just goes on and on.  They’re all around 40 light years away, so the news on earth is a bit slow reaching them, but that ain’t their problem.   That’s the problem created by earth scientists with their dumbass speed limits on radio and light waves.

Fact is, they’ve got creatures taking to the streets rioting about that war.  Religious types setting themselves afire in protest.  National Guardsmen on Pegasi who support the war even fired laser rifles at a bunch of college kids.

But that ain’t the worst of it.  On Zeta Trianguli they’re all stirred up about President Richard Nixon and all the stuff he’s doing to get re-elected.  Heck, they want the President of the US impeached!

What’s so terrible about it all is that creatures on some nearer locations are getting exercised about the Iran hostage crisis, thinking Jimmy Carter needs to do something about it.  And down the road a little way they’re celebrating Ronald Reagan getting elected.

A bit closer in, those monster-looking creatures aren’t anywhere nearly so happy though, as the ones still dancing in the streets about Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down de-regulation policies and his proposals to sell off all the National Forests and BLM lands to real estate developers.  Busting up the Air Traffic Controller Union.

No, those closer garden-slug-things with 16 eyes already went through that and it’s old news.  For them it’s Bill Clinton using the CIA to bring hard drugs into a Federal airstrip in Arkansas, getting into all manner of real estate fraud scandals, and messing up the clothing of some White House clerk-typist.

There are insectoids fairly put out by that second Bush.  And even though they’re fairly up-to-date, the intelligent grapevines on Alpha Centauri are fairly hacked about the wossname, BLM oil spill and this guy in the White House now.

I think you can see how this thing amounts to a crisis, and how the only people who can deal with it are the same people who created it.  Scientists.  Getting laws passed about how fast light and radio waves can travel.

That’s going to have to be changed.  Get everyone singing from the same songbook.

But while we’re at it we probably ought to end the Vietnam War and get Tricky Dixon out of the White House.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in Astronomy, History, Human Behavior, Science

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Old Sol’s Flipping Magnetic Field Crisis

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

The Sun’s Magnetic Field is about to Flip

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/05aug_fieldflip/

http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2013/08/06/splash3.jpg

So here we are again, human beings screwing things up from hell to breakfast in the solar system.  Back a few decades ago before anyone had ever noticed the polarity of the sun reverses itself every eleven years [it’s assumed, because we donealready saw it happen three times already] nobody realized how badly human beings were messing things up.

This polarity reversal seems to correspond to Jupiter being at a particular place in its orbit, similar to the sun spot cycle doing it roughly then, also.  Pure coincidence.

The reality is that human beings are creating too much various stuff in their lifestyles and some laws are going to have to be passed to keep this sort of thing from happening.  Won’t be anytime at all before the academians calling themselves scientists will be lining up for grants to study it all and make recommendations about what laws need passing.

Because those solar reversals are just another sign that man needs to mend his ways.

I consulted Old Sol about it while we were praying him up this morning, but He seemed to have a cold, runny nose or some such thing.  Kept sort of sneezing I reckons, making funny noises.

Guess he didn’t want to talk about it.  Probably something personal.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, Current Issues, Nature, Outdoors, Science

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Zen etc, Persig – The Phaedrus Chatauqua – Classical and Romantic Reality

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 8 comments

Persig’s decided to do his Chatauqua on Phaedrus.  Begins by explaining how Phaedrus saw the world in a classical reality form, explains the difference between those two ways of approaching reality.

Hydrox:  So what’s the Classical reality way of viewing cat food?  Are we cats viewing the Romantic way, or the Classical way?

Me:  Romantic.  No question about it, no compromise, even.  The Classical’s the underlying form.  The components that make up the food, the nutritional value.  The process that went into canning it.  You cats couldn’t care less about that.  Taste and odor are the immediately apparent form, the Romantic.  They’re all you care about.

Hydrox:   I like to eat the insides out of things I catch.  Leave the head and sometimes tail and legs.  I like the underlying form best.

Me:  Actually not.  If you were opening that mouse and looking at the way the digestive tract works, the circulatory system, the nerves, lungs, then you’d be getting into Classical form.  You aren’t looking at underlying function even though it’s inside.  You’re after taste, odor and texture.  There are no goods, no bads in the Classical form. No feelings.  Those are all Romantic form.

Hydrox:  Okay.  But you’re saying this Phaedrus guy was only interested in underlying form?  Classical form?  Is that why he was crazy?

Me:  Not really, but we’ll get into that.  Crazy doesn’t seem to confine itself to one form or another.    And the reasons Phaedrus had his insanity are a lot deeper than that.   More in the manner of the way he broke the world down to analyse it than in the form itself.

Niaid:  Off the subject, but wasn’t the kid here in the story killed in a driveby shooting a few years ago?  A long time after this story.

Me:  Yeah, he was.  Before you cats were even born.  Before Persig wrote Lila, too.

Tabby:  So are we supposed to keep that in mind while we’re doing this?  That this kid’s going to end up dead in a driveby shooting?

Me:  Not if you can keep from it, though it’s not easy to keep it separate.  What happened to that kid later on didn’t have anything to do with Phaedrus, and the way you’ll be thinking about him is Romantic.  Feelings.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Book Reviews, Books

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