Tag Archives: History

Whitey Will Pay

Posted on July 3, 2020 by | 7 comments

Jack wrote this in April, 2006:

Hi blogsters:

Hope you’re all giving yourselves plenty of challenges, making lots of decisions that lead to growth experiences.

Things have gone quiet around here, owl-wise, though the hawks still soar overhead days.  And the coyotes still howl on the mesas.

Just finished a short trip to western New Mexico on an old-new trail of the Lost Adams Diggings.  Rough trip in some ways, because it brought to mind memories of a lot of other trips into that country with men now dead.

But it was physically a reminder of how old this vehicle’s becoming.

Climbing and unclimbing mesas, digging and scraping samples from streambeds, toting them back out to work them down into concentrates for closer examination, all just become the tap on the shoulder gravity gives a man insisting he slow down.

The trip didn’t answer a lot of questions, but it created enough to cause me to know more trips in there will be required.

Ahh.  Adventure!

Meanwhile, back here in the village, the rich old man up the hill behind me evidently has an enemy.   Someone decapitated a rabbit just before Easter and left it on his porch.

Might be because he’s rich and cantankerous, or because he’s said to be miserly and difficult to collect from if a person’s only a mere workman.  Or it might be because he’s all the above, which a number of old villagers are, but also he has the distinction of being an Anglo.

The accident of birth that gives a person ancestors who spoke English and had pinkish skin is a difficult sin for the majority of New Mexicans to forgive.

The Hispanics, who hold all the power, speak the same language as the Conquistadors, Cortez and Coronado, but see themselves as having been robbed of their conquests and rendered downtrodden by white-skinned invaders from the East.

The Native Americans generally just know someone conquered them, but because we’re all born innocent of memory,  have evidently forgotten who did the conquering.

For a while I occasionally used to drive around in a borrowed truck with “WHITEY WILL PAY” bumper-stickered on the tinted glass back window.  As a whitish sort of fellow, I found my feelers a little ruffled with all the thumbs-ups and raised-fist salutes I got from Hispanic and Native American types.

I generally don’t feel I’ve done anything negative to Hispanics, nor Native Americans.  My conscience is clear.

I had a distant kinsman mountain-man who wandered into Santa Fe around 1805, and was held captive for 20-odd years by the Spaniard government (ancestors to the folks who are here today), but I don’t hold it against them.

Let bygones be bygones, I say.

Fact is, old James Purcell’s problems ain’t mine.  I was lucky enough to be allowed to find problems of my own.

His didn’t happen to me.

Same as when Onate cut the foots off all the adult males of the tribe of rebellious Acomas in 1600 something-or-other, which makes Acomas do a lot of whining and complaining today, it wasn’t me did it, and it wasn’t people alive today it happened to.

You don’t hear me complaining about not having the same rights and advantages of Native Americans, no free health care, never having to have a steady job my entire life, being born into a wealth of land I pay no taxes on.

You won’t hear me complaining I can’t open a casino.

And you won’t hear me complain because my distant pore old mountain-man kinsman, James Purcell, got thrown in the hoosegow just because he came to town.  Didn’t do nuthun but be an English speaking man with white skin.

I was born naked.  Those aren’t my troubles.

Jack

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, History, Human Behavior, Mexico, Native Americans, New Mexico

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The Yin Yang Conspiracy 

Posted on June 26, 2020 by | Leave a comment

Jack wrote this in March, 2006:
In 1970, the University of Texas was squared off against itself.  The frats, the student government, the sororities, the administration, the ROTC department, and the cops on the one side, and us on the other.

The Vets against the Vietnam War, the Wobblies (IWW), the Panthers, the Young Socialistist Alliance (Trotskyite), the RYM2 (Revolutionary Youth Movement faction of the Students for a Democratic Society), Weathermen (the other, more interesting side of the SDS), and hundreds of other splinter groups were taking a fair beating, though we had the numbers.

I was in the middle of all that, writing for the alternative newspaper, the RAG, and trying to get an education dovetailed with sex, drugs and Rock and Roll with helping organize an occasional riot, march or rally thrown in for good measure.

That’s when we invented the Yin Yang Conspiracy.  An ad hoc political party.  We ran a longhair named Jeff Jones for student body president, and we threw the bastards out, lock stock and fraternity pin.  Lordee we thought we’d done something fierce, beating the system that way.  Hot diggedy damn.

Anyway, this blog entry is in memory of that microscopic triumph among people who had in common only that they opposed the War. 

The Yin Yang Conspiracy.  A tiny piece of winning the Vietnam War by bringing the troops home.  Winning the easy way.  Coming out in the open, looking those cops, those stay-at-home flag-waving patriots in the eye through their riot masks, and saying, “Enough is enough!”

We learned a lot.  Surveillance, provocateurs, intimidations probably weren’t so pervasive in those days.  No yes-man Congress had passed a Patriot Act, so we still had some rights and protections under the US Constitution.   It would be a tougher gig today.

But, if that was now we’d be doing it again.  We’d be working in both, subtle and overt ways to bring those boys home.

Trying to get them out of there before too many more get all shot up and crippled up and be completely forgotten by the patriots who are waving flags back home.

Jack

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Posted in 1970's, Adventure, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Police, Politics, Texas

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How’s that empire thing working?

Posted on January 23, 2018 by | 9 comments

Maybe most of us don’t care for the idea of empires because we think of them as being something other countries have, but we don’t.    Despite what’s before our eyes ever time we look at a map or watch a news program.  And of course, empires haven’t been faring too well lately.

US expansion 1867 1914

Heck, the British Empire folded up more-or-less spontaneously during the decades after WWII.    Around the same time as the French were getting their deserving asses kicked out of Indo-China to them, Vietnam to us.   Indo-China, Algeria, and pretty much everything else they called their empire.

colonial empires 1910

But around a century ago everyone was still doing it.   Grabbing real estate outside their boundaries and making a fight to keep it.

Here’s a short video demonstrating how empires worked worldwide until around 1945:

https://youtu.be/1csr0dxalpI

That’s how it was done mostly, except when the imperial powers fought one another.   Which wasn’t something anyone liked to do if they could help it because it tended to get a lot of white people killed.

But I’ve digressed.   What I intended to talk about was a remark I made this morning during coffee with Johnny, across the hall.   In some context or other involving the government shut-down and Puerto Rico, I casually mentioned the American empire.

“American empire?   Haw haw haw!   What the hell are you talking about?”

“Heck Johnny, do you think we aren’t an empire.”

“Haw haw haw!   Where do you come up with this stuff?”

I tried a while longer, but the discussion just couldn’t move forward on that tack.   Johnny doesn’t believe the US is an empire and the concept is so foreign to him he refuses even to think about it.

I’m a bit awed by this entire concept.    Are there really people in the world who don’t think the US is an empire?  Well, yes, there are.

Same as there are people who think the moon landings were faked by NASA and that the world is flat.

People believe all sorts of things.

I wonder if there used to be people who didn’t think the British, the French, even the Romans weren’t an empire.

Damn I love this life for the surprises.   The constant surprises.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2018, America, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Politics, Senior Citizens, VA campus, Veterans

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A better way – Getting new royalty when the President croaks

Posted on February 12, 2015 by | 12 comments

This still seems about as salubrious a means of replacing a prez as the one we’ve been using. Time we bellied up to the bar and admitted we love being governed by dynasties of aristocrats. And that aristocrats in this country are anyone who’s a celebrity and rich. Michael Douglas for prez, for instance, because he’s got such a wide range of experience in the movies qualifies him. Provided he has a sexy wife to succeed him when some returned US Navy SEAL offs him with a sniper rifle. Recall, Lee Harvey Oswald and Charlie Whitman were both ex-Marines.

So Far From Heaven

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.  Not all of this is humor.

Must have been November, 1962, election day in Massachusetts though we didn’t know it.  Three young GIs in uniform, Tony Bozza, Julio Ditata and I were off work.  We lived in a brownstone house converted to apartments on Beacon Street, so we wandered over to an ice-cream joint on Boylston Street across from Boston Plaza.

As we finished off our ice cream we saw police cordoning off Boylston Street, people drifting in behind them.  Something was happening so we rushed out for a front-line position.  Asked one of the cops what was going on.

King/President Kennedy was in town.  Came to vote for his brother for the Senate.  Maybe State Senate.  I can’t recall for certain.  JFK was going to stay at the Plaza Hotel across the street.  “Salute when he drives by

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Posted in 1960's, Government

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Miss World 1967 visits the troops

Posted on December 25, 2014 by | 1 comment

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

Bob Hope used to do those USO shows every year.  In fact Al Jolson died in the aftermath of returning from a USO show in Korea.  Fact is, any Christmas entertainment that includes John Wayne jokes and nasty jibes at draft dodgers burning their draft cards is probably worth a rerun anytime anyone is singing songs about Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.

Ms. Welch, at least, is about reality, which every USO show should include a taste of.

As an aside, a lot of you probably didn’t know Clint Eastwood’s real identity was Andy Williams.  Here he is singing something I thought of as a favorite in 1963.

No Christmas is complete without Clint Eastwood singing Old Bilbao Moon.

Here’s wishing everyone a merry little war.

Old Jules

 

 

 

 

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Posted in 2014, America, US Army, Veterans

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Asian grocery mystery

Posted on December 22, 2014 by | 8 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.  A few days ago Jeanne decided to give me a shot of rare pleasure.  She took me to my favorite place in the Kansas City area:  A giant Asian grocery store.

As we entered the large vestibule at the entrance I noticed large ceramic pots for sale and the one below caught my eye.

IMG_5046

I walked over for a closer look and called to Jeanne.  “Look at this!”  Pointing with my cane, “These are petroglyphs from the US!”

Meanwhile an Oriental man noticed me from inside and rushed out.  “One hunnerd dollars!  One hunnerd dollars!”  I dragged my attention away from the pot and stared at him.  He pointed to another pot.  “Fifty dollars!  Fifty dollars!”

IMG_5045

Then he pointed inside the pot and shouted, “Look!”

IMG_5047

So the burning question is, are Asian petroglyphs so similar to Native American petroglyphs as to be indistinguishable from them?  These pots seem to be decorated with some symbols definitely not Native American, mixed promiscuously with reproductions of petroglyphs I’ve seen countless times in New Mexico and Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

It’s clear no matter what the answer might be that Asians have gotten the jump, however, on the ceramic petroglyph trade.

If I had someplace to put one of those pots and something I wanted to put in it and $100 lying around with nothing to do I think I’d just buy one of those pots.  And maybe haul it over to Zuni or Acoma to give them a looksee.  The tribes have been losing business to Asians copying their fetishes, their kachinas, their other crafts for a longish while.  Maybe a bit of reversed engineering of petroglyph covered pots  would provide a shot in the arm for them.

Aside from the fact nobody’s likely to buy some damned pot covered with petroglyphs.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Native American, Native Americans

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Japanese Bonsai Charges Onto Good American Machine Guns

Posted on December 16, 2014 by | Leave a comment

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Most of you probably are celebrating the return to the Philippine Islands this day in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-four today.  Or in the instance of my charming ex-wife, Caroline, merely being born in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-seven.  Both events teetering the scales of the human  balance in the Universe somewhat in the direction of ‘good’.

The US Military experience in the Philippines was ‘good’ mostly because contrary to previous behavior on other islands the Japanese didn’t come storming out of caves with fixed bayonets pruning trees as they ran down onto US machine guns.  Those damned trees remained intact for the most part if they weren’t hit by good US bullets and shells.  No damned bonsai forests of fancy trees for the Filipino population to deal with after the surrender.

That, and there wasn’t a problem with Death Marches the way happened the last time the US military ran up against the Japanese military in the Philippines.  That Bataan Death March was evidently most unpleasant, both for the GIs being forced to walk shoeless and hungry across the island, and for the Japanese having to shoot or stick them with bayonets for lollygagging.  Nothing of that sort in 1944.  The Japanese were perfectly well behaved, though uncompromising.  And the GIs resisted the entirely justified impulse to kill every last man of them.

The harbor at Manilla ended up being a great place for US sailors to put in and get drunk and whore.

All in all everything worked out well in the end.  Seemed almost no-time at all the US was fire bombing Tokyo and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Then rebuilding the Japanese steel and other industries bombed to rubble during the war so’s everyone made a pile of money.  And another great place for GIs to get drunk and whore!

Heck, guys were still getting drunk and whoring in Japan all the way up into the Vietnam War.  When I was in Korea almost all the GIs took two weeks ‘rest and recuperation’ leave to Japan sometime during their tours.  The Japanese whores were generally more cosmopolitan, it was believed, than Korean ladies.

So for those of us alive December 16, 1944, it was the first day of the rest of our lives and it all turned out good.  Except for a few Japanese troops hiding in the jungles who wouldn’t listen to reason.

Think of it!  If Japan had surrendered December 16, 1944, it could have avoided having Tokyo firebombed and Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuked.  And I’d have been able to celebrate it with this blog entry.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1940's, America, History, Human Behavior, Military, US Army, Veterans

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Stolen valor? Give me a freaking break.

Posted on December 4, 2014 by | 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?

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

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Posted in Adventure, Government, Military

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Brain Drain: Charley Whitman’s brain is missing!

Posted on December 3, 2014 by | 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

 

 

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Posted in 2014, Education, Human Behavior

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Exploiting Us Veterans

Posted on December 2, 2014 by | 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.]

 

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

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