Jack wrote this in September, 2006:
Morning blogsters:
Last night one of the cats awakened me from the window, even though that window’s now covered with foggy plastic. I don’t know how she was able to pick up on what was going on outside, but I glanced at the monitor for the security camera when I saw the security light was on in the yard.
A spring coyote pup was out there wandering around checking things out. That one’s going to be a problem before too long, I’m thinking.
Old timey country coyotes were as cunning as a living creature can be, but they could be depended upon to behave in certain ways. They had a healthy respect for the cunning and destructive abilities of humans. Out away from town one of the ways a person could keep down the number of coyotes coming in close bothering what wasn’t to be bothered was to urinate around the chicken house daily, and around the perimeter of where you didn’t want them.
When a person was bothered by with coyote-trouble, it would be a single one, not the entire pack. The person could study him, identify him by a dozen traits, figure out his habits, and take him out without having to go after the whole pack.
Not so, these newfangled city coyotes.
I read in National Geographic magazine, I think it was, or maybe Smithsonian, yeah, I think it was a Smithsonian that Jeanne gave me, that coyotes have done a turnabout during the last 15 years…. nobody understands why.
There’s a new kind of coyote moving into the cities and towns, first time anyone knows about, and they’re living right there among us. The article focused on the ones in one of the parks in Washington D.C.
I suppose I have more respect for the intellect of country coyotes than perhaps any other wild creature. To be honest, I hate to even contemplate what’s going to become of things when a large population of them grows up in cities unafraid of people, watching people, same as they do in the wild, studying them, learning from them.
We haven’t heard the last of this.
Jack
So Far From Heaven 
30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War
Media Beat (7/27/94)
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.
“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression”, announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.
That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”
But there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam â_” no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.
A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media…leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.
The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on “routine patrol” in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 â_” and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.
The truth was very different.
Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers â_” in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.
“The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam…had taken place,” writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were “part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964.”
On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf â_” a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.
But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to “retaliate” for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.
Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to “freak weather effects,” “almost total darkness” and an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing ship’s own propeller beat.”
One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot’s vice presidential candidate. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” recalled Stockdale a few years ago, “and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets â_” there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.”
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
But Johnson’s deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed the New York Times, “went to the American people last night with the somber facts.” The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.”
An exhaustive new book, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam, begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media “described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat’ â_” when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North.”
Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media’s “almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information” â_” as well as “reluctance to question official pronouncements on ‘national security issues.'”
Daniel Hallin’s classic book The “Uncensored War” observes that journalists had “a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn’t used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats.”
What’s more, “It was generally known…that `covert’ operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time.”
In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution â_” the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam â_” sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only “no” votes.) The resolution authorized the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
The rest is tragic history.
Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget “our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.”
Schanberg blamed not only the press but also “the apparent amnesia of the wider American public.”
And he added: “We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”