Seems there’s a moon of Saturn spewing water out into space faster than Saturn Moonians can catch it to make proper use of it. That whole Saturn ring fiasco is mainly chunks of ice out cluttering up what would otherwise be a nice, clean see-through piece of real estate with nothing in it to offend drought-stricken city people who have grass needs watering, golf courses needing to be kept green, swimming pools and hot-tubs to frolic in, and other important uses.
But that’s not the worst of it. A growing body of evidence argues Mars used to have plenty of water for golf courses and whatnot, but it got ripped off and wasted by parties unknown.
Investigators among the astronomical community recently discovered a black hole off a few hundred million light years away is doing something similar there.
They’ve been bragging for some while about creating ‘baby black holes’ in the super-colliders and at Sandia National Laboratory.
I’ve read somewhere that Chicago sold off their City Parking Meters and Towing Services to Arabs, maybe other public services, as well. Evidently some other cities are looking into similar measures, maybe already doing it. Haven’t heard of any National Parks, National Forests or other federal holdings being handed over to the Chinese to allay the servicing of our debt to them, or our trade deficit.
“We’re getting calls from investors from all across Asia who are interested in Idaho,” she said.
Idaho’s location, only another 45 minutes farther by air than Seattle from Asia, will open many opportunities, state and local officials said. The state’s low cost for doing business will help, too.Fact is, the government debt is owned by every US citizen. When the nation is mortgaged the people who hold the note loaned it with some assurance they’d either get the money back, get paid back in kind, or they’d get concessions to their advantage to make the loaning of it worth doing.
There’s no indication that industrial zone in Idaho would put any US citizens back to work, but it might do a lot to put Chinese to work on US soil, so’s they don’t have to ship their products so far to US consumers who can’t manufacture their own products such as toasters, television sets, kids toys and shoes.
It’s a slow day here, is the reason I’m posting this. It’s not because I was over reading White Trash Repairs/There, I Fixed It – Repairs blog http://thereifixedit.failblog.org/ and got riled with their uppidy attitudes.
No, I just feel a need to be forthright about the kind of person I choose to be. Maybe that can best be expressed with a sneak preview of some projects I’ll be discussing here later.
After I haul some more rocks the above is going to be a woodshed with a watertight roof. The hot tub was on the porch when I moved here, cracked, home to wildlife. Now it’s metamorphosing into an eventual place to keep my firewood dry.
There’s a lot of work yet to be done raising that roof a few more feet.
Then there’s this. A nesting box for brooding hens to keep them separate until the chicks are old enough to mix with the flock, but still protected from predators. Refrigerator shelves cut down to fit the cable spool, mounted on a sawed-in-half lawn mower platform for mobility: Or this: A chicken-house fabricated entirely from salvage, discarded shower doors, camper shell roof, refrigerator shelves, whatever came to hand free:
I don’t know when we began giving power to strangers. I think it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Maybe we watched too many Westerns during our formative years, learned from those steely eyed men in saloons that what strangers think about us is worth a gunfight.
Nowadays the extreme version happens in city traffic. Someone shoots someone else a bird. Next step is an exchange of gunfire.
Here’s how the scenario runs:
Some complete stranger pronounces a bias we don’t share.
Our thought response:
“This offends me.”
That thought process is driven by a deeper one:
“I want to be offended. I give this stranger the power to offend me. I assign enough value to what this stranger says, or believes, to allow it to trigger a negative emotional path within me. What this stranger says or believes matters.”
We know better.
Strangers cut too wide a swath in their traits to have any real value. They span the breadth of potential human biases. But even knowing this we give them the power to ruin a moment.
I say this is a recent phenomenon because humans of the past behaved differently. Our forefathers didn’t care what Brits thought about us because they recognized that Brits live within an entirely different set of interests.
Even today a Zuni doesn’t care what a Navajo thinks about anything because from the perspective of a Zuni, Navajos don’t have anything valid to contribute to any meaningful discussion. Navajos live in a different reality from Zunis.
Both Navajos and Zunis choose to allow themselves to be offended by the opinions of Anglos and Hispanics, but there’s a reason. They’ve found taking offense is a means of gaining power over those groups.
But neither a Zuni, nor a Navajo would bother being offended by the thoughts and words of the other because to each there’s nothing the other might think that carries the weight of validity.
Not long ago the same was true of people almost everywhere. The people in the town where I was reared cared about the opinions of people within that town, but they couldn’t have cared less what the people in Clovis, twenty miles away thought. It was generally understood that Clovis people were stupid and might think and say anything.
Today we care what everyone thinks about almost everything. We pretend to believe what they think carries value, but we know better. We just like the feel of being offended..
Make my day, Stranger! I’m handing you the power to offend me.
This leaves me cold.
Human opinion hasn’t held up well under scrutiny. It’s worth about what it costs. Mine aren’t that reliable and I haven’t found those of others to be any better.
Leavenworth Papers #17 – The Petsamo-Kirkenes Operation: Soviet Breakthrough and Pursuit in the Arctic, October 1944, Major James F Gebhardt,Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, 1948
Detailed examination of the Soviet success in the offensive attempting to identify what the US military should learn from it. Concluded light infantry to be the weapon of choice in arctic warfare. Examines the lessons learned by the Germans fighting under those conditions.
Good read for those interested in such matters.
Hidden Horrors – Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Yuki Tanaka, Transitions: Asians and Asian Americans Series, 1996
The Contents describes it better than I can:
1. The Sandakan POW Camp and the Geneva Convention
2. The Sandakan Death Marches and the Elimination of POWs
3. Rape and War: The Japanese Experience
4. Judge Webb and Japanese Cannibalism
5. Japanese Biological Warfare Plans and Experiments on POWs
6. Massacre of Civilians at Kavieng
Conclusion: Understanding Japanese Brutality in the Asia-Pacific War
Tanaka elaborates on the collaboration between the US and Japan to cover-up and downplay many of these events because of the post-WWII need for Japan as a strong Pacific partner against Communist aggression. Many were not investigated, prosecuted, even mentioned again in public media.
Fifty years after the Japanese surrender Tanaka writes: “Consequently, we Japanese have failed to recognize ourselves as aggressors, still less as perpetrators of war crimes. Moreover, because of the widespread perception of ourselves as victims of war, the notion of “victim” gradually expanded even to the point that the Japanese state was also seen as a victim of war.”
Reveals various deals made between the US Command under Dugout Doug and the Japanese commanders who conducted human lab experiments on POWs. Immunity from prosecution in return for everything learned in the experiments.
The King’s Own – Captain Frederick Marryat
Marryat’s a worthy read. He was a British Navy Captain when he retired in the 1820s and began publishing fiction works based on his experiences. His writings almost certainly were foundations for Horatio Hornblower and a lot of other sea yarn characters in fiction series during the 20th Century.
Marryat’s the daddy and granddaddy of them all.
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, George MacDonald Frazer
The Flashman series is possibly the most laughing [and among the most educational] historical fiction series ever written.
I thoroughly resent Frazer dying before he wrote several more of them, though I re-read the ones he did write at least one time every decade. He’s welcome to resent me dying off without reading them again if it works out that way.
The Flashman Papers in Chronological order
Flashman [Britain, India and Afghanistan, 1839-42]
Royal Flash [England, 1842-43, Germany 1847-48]
Flashman’s Lady [England, Borneo, Madagascar 1842-45]
Flashman and the Mountain of Light [Indian Punjab 1845-46]
Flash for Freedom [England, West Africa, USA, 1848-49]
Flash and the Redskins [USA 1849-50 and 1875-76]
Flashman at the Charge [England, Crimea and Central Asia 1854-55]
Flashman in the Great Game [Scotland, England1856-58]
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord [India, South Africa, USA, 1858-59]
Flashman and the Dragon [China, 1860]
The Engines of God, Jack McDevitt
Respectable and readable sci-fi.
The Conscience of the Rich, CP Snow
Strange and unsettling book. Published during the 1950s the title’s an anachronism to such an extent the reader feels a bit lost at the beginning, figuring on some class warfare thing that would have found that name a decade later.
In fact, it’s probably the book Maugham would have written in Of Human Bondage if he’d been writing about a family of Jewish aristocrats in Britain during the 1920s and 1830s. The intractable controls imposed by the Jewish family on personal choices of family members in almost every facet of their lives.
Unsettling, but a worthy read.
Telegraph Days – Larry McMurtry
That original McMurtry book where he decided to become Louis L’Amour wasn’t bad, certainly a lot better than some that came later. I’d put Telegraph Days somewhere up near the top of his work since he became the great American novelist trying to push L’Amour out of the way.
The Time it Never Rained – Elmer Kelton
Good read about that pivotal time in the relationship between independent ranchers in the west and the US government, coincident with the drought of the 1950s.
Rumpole’s Last Case – John Mortimer
Another good Rumpole. What more needs saying?
The Black Throne – Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen
Saberhagen books were always considered safe to buy at a quarter in the thrift stores until this one. I imagine it wasn’t him dropped the ball, but maybe it was just a pot-boiler for both of them. The writing craft is what’s at fault. Everything’s there, crisp dialogue, plot, characters with some depth. Good command of the language.
But something’s missing. I wouldn’t spend a quarter on it next time if I can remember when I see it again in a thrift store.
Retired university librarian. Oblique political humor of a liberal slant, frequently a smiler, sometimes a chuckler or horselaugher.
If you know more about politics than I do you might enjoy it even more. To me they’re just faces sometimes attached to names, but fun and interesting.
“Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the party of the Confederacy, the spinelessness of the Democrats and crap about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.”
I’m not crazy about a lot of the content, but the airplane pics she posts are worth the price of admission and reading the posts offers a different slant on things worth chewing on.
If you’re one of those folks who believe you ‘don’t like’ the works or Renaissance writers you might be the victim of having been forced to read the wrong ones by academians. Fact is the period includes some of the most entertaining writing mankind has ever been guilty of producing. Rabelais is one such example.
Academian praisers of Rabelais and this particular work have already expressed a lot of the truths to be found here, the exquisite style, the masterly satire. All they say is true and would be reason enough to read Gargantua and Pantagruel. I won’t repeat those laurels to affirm them. Instead, I’ll say it’s gutter crude, frequently barnyard humor with more levels than Grand Central Station.
Hilarious work.
But I’ll suggest another reason a segment of readers might find Rabelais interesting. Followers of the Thelemic ‘tradition’ created by Alister Crowley during the early 1900s might be surprised to discover Crowley’s claims to having channeled the doctrine from Horus in Cairo in 1910, were preceded by Rabelais several centuries earlier. Rabelais creates an imaginary monastery and sect of monks he names, “Thelema”, where a sign above the entry reads, “DO AS YOU WILL”. Sound familiar?
Give this book a chance. If you do you won’t regret it unless you offended by violations of polite discourse.
But if you read it as an admirer of Crowley’s channeling be prepared to have some of your balloons deflated, lean back and enjoy butchering of a sacred cow for the barbecue.
Visiting blogs since starting this one has been an unexpected learning experience. The general impression that almost everyone is concerned about the state of the world and the nation wasn’t a surprise.
But the fortified positions, the polarization, the nagging thought that a lot of people would gladly enforce their viewpoints on others at gunpoint if they had the option, is troubling if accurate. The middle ground, the concept of a loyal opposition, even the concept of people still potentially being okay if they have different political, religious, differing gender viewpoints just isn’t out there anymore. No live-and-let-live in the mix.
The level of rancor between opposing opinions approaches a level where it wouldn’t be too shocking if, say, a 9/11 happened in an environment limiting US victims to a particular political or religious bias, and sets of blog dialogues appearing to express:
“What the hell! They were all Tea-Baggers!”
Or,
“What the hell! They were all pinko liberals!”
Or Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists.
There are already posts on blogs I visit saying, “Let God sort them out.”
I can’t help wondering whether I’m the only one troubled by this.
I used to know a guy, a good man, who was also an alcoholic of the sort you’d rather not be too close to. Jay was his name, an ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Air Corps, B24 pilot of um-de-umph hundred bombing missions over Germany during WWII. War hero.
By the mid-1960s Jay had a drinking problem bad enough to be placed repeatedly into the hands of the Texas Alcoholic Rehabilitation Commission to dry out. Finally, in those days a bright new shining light among the mental health medicos was the pre-frontal lobotomy, was chosen as the tool of choice for curing what ailed old Jay….. But the unfortunate side effects were that a lot of him ceased to be Jay.
But those wise medicos knew what was best for him, they’d read all the recent advances and articles, so they strapped him down to a gurney and inserted electrodes on his temples and shot the juice to him. Several times.
I’d heard about all this, thought it was fairly awful, but what the hell. A few months later I was among a group of young folks friends of his who got invited to spend a day on Galveston Bay cruising around in Jay’s cabin cruiser down there.
Jay was wearing a tee-shirt that proclaimed, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy”. And he did.
It finally killed him, alcohol, the lobotomy didn’t change that…. but he always believed, afterward, that it was a fairly shabby thing for society to have done to him, that lobotomy. Deprived him of his right to make his own mistakes. At least, it attempted to.
If you boil all that down and scrape the leavings off the bottom of the pot, that’s about the way I feel about the likely outcome of the undercurrents at work in this country.
Someone’s going to get the upper hand, one side or the other.
The ones left holding smaller bag might need a bottle to soften up the resulting enforced prefrontal lobotomies and attitude adjustments.
A Great Cultural Revolution
If old Jay were alive he’d probably buy a tee-shirt.
I was one of those weirdos who believed so thoroughly in Y2K that I quit the last years of a career, cashed in my retirement, walked away from the IRS, all the bills, a house mortgage, totally believing it was all moot because in just a few months it would all collapse. I figured there was a chance high enough to bet on that everyone left after the chaos would be wandering around hungry, diseased, and dying, if the computer gurus were telling the truth. January 1, 1999, I performed the irreversible deed. The retirement money made a down payment on 140 acres of land in remote high desert, I drilled a well, built a cabin, stocked up on countless items the throngs of hopeless survivors would need to survive a bit longer.
I knew there was a medium possibility the IRS, the land payments, all the rest would eventually come due if Y2K didn’t happen, but I thought the consequences of it happening and me not doing it were worse than the alternative of taking the plunge and it not happening. Once a person considers seriously the possibility that society might collapse, it’s surprising how reasonable it seems to think so.
Did my best to be a refugee camp waiting to happen. I bought a lot of chicks to be eggs and food for the future hungry. I knew I couldn’t survive long because of the shelf-life of a medication I require to stay alive, but I had hopes a few folks could survive thanks to a lot of training and experience I’d had in woods lore, emergency management, and survival. I moved in to a tent on the 140 acres in mid-1999, until the cabin was built and the well drilled.
I spent the next 16-18 months pretty much alone, sometimes going weeks without seeing another person. It was the best time of my entire life. I loved it. I wouldn’t change a minute of 1999 until now, but they were the hardest years I’ve ever lived. I’m a risk taker, more than most, but I’m also a damned fool. Fool enough to believe Y2K not happening January 1, 2000, doesn’t mean Y2K won’t ever happen. But also fool enough to know I’m not wise enough to know when it will, nor whether it will.
This blog will include some of the material written during that time. The rest is a compilation of reflections, before and since, of my varied runs at the brick wall of something rhyming with wisdom.
The discovery, beginning about 15 years ago, that I’m not anywhere near as smart as I think I am, and that I’m a world away from knowing as much as I think I know, has been unsettling and somewhat disruptive. That realization, along with the concurrent observation that an overwhelming piece of what I do know is wrong, hasn’t been as easy to incorporate into something useful in my life as you might think.
Before my smarts and knowings all started to unravel I was a fairly impressive person. I could explain, without you even asking me to do it, just about anything you might be wondering about. I knew what you ought to do with your life, how your life became the lousy, empty mess it appears to me to be, and what the government ought to do about anything it had the power to do. I knew what men ought to do about women and other men, and I knew what women ought to do about men and other women.
I began to get screwed out of that when out of the corner of my eye I noticed some aspects of my own life that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. It crept into my consciousness that I’d made a lot of choices and given a plethora of advice to others that simply didn’t have a lot of merit.
This didn’t come all at once. It started as a trickle with a lot of seemingly small matters I couldn’t help noticing, which I tried to compartmentalize and ignore, same as everyone else does. But eventually I couldn’t keep them inside the fences I’d built for them. They were forever sneaking over mingling with others I’d locked up in file drawers I’d clearly marked, “TOP SECRET – DO NOT OPEN”.
This forced me to try to herd them back where they belonged, but in doing so the others tagged along, dancing and clowning and shamelessly demanding I recognize they existed, wanting me to scratch them behind the ears and pay some attention to them.
I figured the easiest approach would be to have a look at their blood lines and shoot the mongrels and mutts, but keep the purebreds. This required an examination of how I came by all that knowing of every description.
It rocked me to my boot heels to find almost every one of those certainties came from something someone else said, and I believed it, hugged it tight, and called it my own. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t then asked myself where the people I’d heard it from came to own it. Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me they’d also heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else.
Gradually, I realized I hadn’t done much thinking for myself. In fact, I hadn’t based much of anything on the evidence of my own eyes and observations. Strangers with the voice of authority told me many things other strangers had told them and I frequently accepted it as gospel. I often abdicated my intelligence in favor of those strangers many times removed. Without consciously deciding to do so, I treated truth as though it relied on a vote-count of humans to decide its own nature.
I hate it, discovering something like that. The last 15 years of dismantling a system of giving strangers default authority to control my mind and my life hasn’t even been entirely successful. I still constantly find the opinions of strangers creeping in, waving their arms around, trying to grab control so I won’t be stupid anymore.
But I’m determined to keep at it. All those strangers saying things back and forth to one another and believing it over time hasn’t done much good for the people who believe it now.
And it never did me a damned bit of good, even though I was smarter when I believed it, too.
Old Jules
Hi blogsters:
Sometimes trying to piece together our lives can be quite a chore. Peaceful Warrior posted something on one of the groups about the way his name has been a problem to him, and it got me thinking about it.
I was given a name at birth that nobody since has been able to pronounce. They followed that with another one nobody’d ever heard of. So when I exited that burg at the age of 15 or so, I left those two names behind and became Jack for most purposes.
But as a struggling young writer in the late ’60s I found myself needing yet another handle…. I was writing for the hairy-chested men magazines… Men, For Men Only, a genre of magazines that vanished by the mid-1970s.
They usually had a picture on the cover of a Marine with a machete struggling with python wrapped around a half-naked woman in some jungle. That sort of thing.
Well, fact was, in those days I thought there was half-a-chance I’d want to be president, or try to get a decent job sometime. Didn’t want stories like, Viet-Cong Seductress, or The Half-Million Dollar Sex Salon The Texas Rangers Can’t Find following old Jack around the remainder of his life. Adopted the pseudonym, Frank C. Riley, which worked well enough.
Then the market collapsed for hairy-chested men stories. Best paying hack-writer market left was something called ‘Confession‘ mags, which must have been read by the mothers of Romance Novel readers of today. I figured, what the hell.
Popped out I Was An Outlaw Motorcycle Mama, sent it off, got a nice letter back telling me there was a middling amount of what they read they liked, but that I needed to work on my female perspective a bit. Eventually they published it, but they never bought another, though I tried. But unless I’m mistaken, Motorcycle Mama was the only time I ever succeeded in passing myself off as a woman. Only time I really ever tried, during that confessions market thing.
Amazing the things a man will do for money.
Old Jules
Hack Writing
Editor:
“Give me a 750 word
Masterpiece
Describing
How crushed ice
Machines
Can be used
On construction sites
To slow the cooling
And surface cracking
Of freshly poured
Cement.
Make it lively
Make it dance
I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”
“Give me 2000 words
To titillate
Give me that whorehouse
That famous Chicken Ranch
In La Grange, Texas.
I want pockets picked
I want gonorrhea
I want luscious hookers
And hints of corruption
Deep in Texas
Law enforcement
I want it yesterday
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”
“I want 2000 words
Fiction
Something about
Beautiful Vietcong seductresses
Luring innocent GIs
To bed and death
In some stinking thatched hut
With pigs squealing outside
I want to see her despair
Her soul searching
As she discovers she loves him
I want a hint of non-fiction.
We’ll argue
Prices
Three months from now
When you see the check.”
Workshop:
“I want a poem
About how you feel
When your lover
Jilts you
In favor of someone
Of his own sex
And begins
Taking hormones.
I want the word
Encyclopedia
Used in every
Third line.
No pay
You just have
The pleasure
And satisfaction
Of doing what I
Told you to.
To help you
Get used to the feel
Of being a writer”
From “Poems of the New Old West”, NineLives Press, Copyright 2003
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
It’s no doggoned wonder we’re suffering drought. This news piece lets the cat out of the bag.
So Far From Heaven 
