The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection has been released

President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to release all the documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.  This has been a LONG time coming for many, many people.  It bothered me in high school when I realized how much my government was holding back and it made a lot of my classmates mad too (this was right at the time the movie JFK was out).

But after sixty-two years since this collection began to coalesce, we're finally getting a look at it all.

Here's the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection's main page at the National Archives.  A lot of stuff had been made public already.  But what you're probably most interested in is what has been released because of Trump's executive order.  That stuff started getting dumped a few days ago: more than thirty-three thousand pages across nearly twelve hundred PDF documents.  Here's the link to that newly-released material, and word on the street is that there's more still to come.

What do I think so far?  I've only had time to peruse a little bit of it but there is some interesting stuff in there, a lot of it having to do with anti-communist activities on the part of the American government in the early Sixties, especially in regard to Cuba.  I found one document describing how a ballerina dancer was actually a communist agent.

But most people are going to want to home in on the meaty stuff pertaining to the assassination.  And they are finding some interesting things.  Among the more fascinating come upon so far: Gary Underhill, a CIA agent who stated the day after the killing that there was a clique within the agency that was responsible for carrying it out.  A few months later Underhill was found dead, it was ruled a suicide.  Just one more mystery among the pile of the biggest enigma in American history.

Back in 2016 when I was traveling across America with my dog Tammy, we spent a few weeks in Texas and during that time I got to visit Dealey Plaza in Dallas.  This was it: the most analyzed patch of land in the annals of man.  This is where all the theories span out from and where many more converge again.  And after a lifetime of wanting to see it for myself I was finally there.

Here are some of the pictures that were taken...

Behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll.  This is the spot that several witnesses said they heard the sound of gunshots coming from.

Tammy and me atop the grassy knoll.

The spot where Kennedy was when the fatal shot hit is marked by a small white X on the road (click to enlarge)

The former Texas School Book Depository, from a window on the sixth floor of which is where Lee Harvey Oswald presumably fired the shots as the presidential motorcade passed by on the street below.

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Joe Biden is gone today (thank the Lord!)

The infamous "red speech" in Philadelphia, September 2022

Before I render a final grade for Joseph Robinette Biden's term as president, let's wind the clock back four years ago on this blog.  I predicted then that come January 2025 the United States of America would be in the worst condition it had been in, in half a century.

A bold forecast.  I swore then that if I was wrong, I would eat my fedora.  And I would have.  With A1 steak sauce.

I knew there was no chance of me getting it wrong.  Biden has certainly not let me down in that regard.

To everyone who voted for this fool: please don't do that again.  Because of Biden and his disastrous policies I had to leave a job that I loved.  That's my own particular tale of woe that came about.

And a few hours ago Biden "pre-emptively pardoned" Anthony Fauci, Mark Miley, and the members of the "January 6 committee".  Stevie Wonder could have seen that coming.

Joe Biden is leaving politics as he has always lived it for more than fifty years: corrupt, craven, and criminal-minded.

So how does Biden rate with his peers, in the estimation of this trained historian?

In keeping with my history education, I am thus grading most of the Presidents of my lifetime...

Reagan: A

GHW Bush: C

Clinton: D

GW Bush: D-

Obama: F

Trump: B+

Biden: F

Indeed, Joe Biden is the F-iest president I've ever studied.  Not even James Buchanan caused as much destruction to America as Biden and Harris did.

Reagan is the gold standard by which I measure the presidents of my lifetime, but he wasn't perfect.  The first Bush never really wanted to be president but even if he did, reneging on his "no new taxes" promise consigned him to being just average.  Clinton damaged the rule of law in this country, immeasurably.  The second Bush was a terrible little man who made the rest of us suffer for his personal frailties (while also exploding the size and power of government).  Obama was truly "One Big A-- Mistake America", he vowed to change the country and that's what he did in all the wrong ways.  Trump's first term was the most proactive and positive since Reagan, but it suffered from a poor choice of staff and also the incessant chicanery and "lawfare" by Trump's opponents.  Perhaps he will have learned from this and his second administration will be far better.

As for Biden, there is no redeeming the past four years.  This very incompetent and corrupt man, who has done absolutely nothing virtuous in his half a century of political life, is leaving America in a MUCH worse place than when he became president.  I don't even know if it can honestly be said that we've had a president these last four years at all.

Biden and Harris and everyone associated with them will be remembered only for being the worst gang of freaks and thugs and criminals in the history of American politics.  May we NEVER tolerate such immaturity and fraud and corruption again!

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My first op-ed in two years is live at The Federalist!

I'm going to preface the remainder of this post by saying something which I probably didn't do my best to get across in this piece.  Mainly, that what I've written about is a tragedy.  When any one person has wasted more of a lifetime than too many good people ever get to have, only to wind down his or her time on this earth with naught but pain and hurt inflicted upon others, that is not a thing to gloat about.  That is a very sad thing, indeed.

Time keeps on slipping into the future.  And for all his schemes and plans and plots over five decades, they have ultimately earned Joseph Robinette Biden not an iota of esteem or honor.  He had it all, and it has now come to nothing.

No, there will be no crowds waiting to enter the Joe Biden Presidential Library...

And that is what the first op-ed piece that I've written in more than two years is about.  It just went live on The Federalist.  The title is "No One Wants To Visit A Biden Presidential Library", it says what it means and it means what it says.  When I was traveling across America with my dog a few years ago I was able to make stops at the libraries of Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.  Each of them had throngs of admirers there to remember those men and their times.

I really, seriously can't imagine that happening at the future Biden Presidential Library.

Well, there it is.  Feel free to read it and leave a comment here if you're so led.  And to everyone visiting this blog today, greetings!  Thank you for stopping by here.  It's not a presidential library but I like to think there's a little something interesting for everyone :-)

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Helene: After the storm

The past few days will go down in history.  The comparison I keep hearing is that "this is our Katrina" and that's not inaccurate at all.

If God saw fit to humble us, He certainly did with Hurricane Helene.

As I write this it's almost 7:30 pm EST on October 1st, 2024.  I was away from the house for much of the day so I don't know when exactly the juice came back on but when I returned an hour ago the power was restored.  It had been out since a little before 8 on Friday morning, four and a half days ago.  So that's about a hundred hours that we were without electricity.

I drove around the area on Friday night.   Didn't get too far.  There were big trees fallen all over the place, across the roadways.  I've never seen so many power lines down.

I had to conserve battery power on the various devices, like my phone and iPad.  Yesterday morning I ventured out and got to the library in downtown Spartanburg, found a spot on the floor next to a wall outlet and recharged the phone.  I've been limiting its use, employing it only when absolutely necessary.  Because there was no telling when power would come back to our homes.

My dog and I are in upstate South Carolina.  And it could have been much worse.

Asheville, North Carolina is a little less than an hour to our north.  As of this evening I-40 going east out of the city is open but nothing else.  The town is pretty much unreachable except by helicopter (Asheville Regional Airport is starting to get supply flights coming in but that's a bit far from the city limits).  At last count more than 60 people are dead from the storm in Buncombe County.

Half an hour to our west, we have friends in Greenville.  They have been without power since Friday.

The town of Chimney Rock has been wiped off the map.

Sections of highways in the western part of North Carolina have been destroyed.

Local schools are out until Monday next week.  Remote learning via Internet is also out.

The power crews are working around the clock to restore electricity.  They have come in from all up and down the country and some have arrived from Canada.  They can't possibly be appreciated enough.

As for my own account...

Restricting the use of devices meant that it would be unwise to write, no matter how creative I was feeling.  And the only flashlight I have is on my iPhone.  So  I spent the daylight hours doing lots of reading.  I try to read George Orwell's 1984 every few years and I was behind on that so Sunday afternoon I was engorged in that novel.  And yesterday, for whatever reason, I started re-reading Helter Skelter.  I did write a bit for my book, the old-fashioned way: with a pen and notebook.  So I guess it can be said that my attempt to contribute to the world's literature is sort of a multimedia effort.

It's been a wild past few days.  And I was expecting the power to be restored sometime late Friday.  So I'm very thankful that it's back.

I've been through hurricanes a number of times in my life.  Helene topped them all.  For it to come this far inland and still packing a punch is almost a freak occurrence.  It's being called a one-in-a-thousand-year catastrophe.

And that's pretty much my report.  Going to spend the rest of the evening getting my bearings back, take a LONG hot shower, give my dog Tammy some love and treats, maybe watch a movie.

Helene has certainly made me thankful for things that we too often take for granted.  And like I said, it could have been worse here.

Thoughts and prayers going up and out for everyone who's been affected by this storm.

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"Make Mine Freedom" from 1948: Don't drink the Ism!

So help me, I'm going to show this cartoon from almost eighty years ago until I'm blue in the face, if that's what it takes to stop people from drinking Ism!

It was in 2009 when I first came across "Make Mine Freedom", a 1948 educational film produced by Harding College.  I was immediately struck by how prophetic this animated short was.  How it warned against the dangers of socialism.  "Ism" is a blight that corrupts and destroys everything that it touches.

Not for the first time, not for the last, there are people in this country trying to sell "Ism" to us.  But it is a bitter elixir that will do naught but poison us and rob us and our children of precious liberty.

America is not perfect.  It never has been.  It never will be.  We have made mistakes along the way, just as any other nation has.  But we as a people have done pretty good in owning up to that.  America does NOT need MORE government "fixing things" that we can do on our own.  In America there is equality of opportunity.  There is no guarantee of equality of outcome though, however.  But that is what today's supporters of "Ism" are trying to sell us, and all it results in is that much less freedom and prosperity.

Here is "Make Mine Freedom".  Remember: Don't drink the Ism!

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I hope y'all are watching this tonight

 As my father said, when President Reagan was shot the day before my seventh birthday:

"Pay attention son, this is history."

 

 

 

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"To remember": June 6th, 1944

 Company A, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division

wading onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach

(Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France)

on the morning of June 6, 1944.

Photo credit: Chief Photographer's Mate Robert F. Sargent

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the single greatest military maneuver in recorded history: the invasion of the Normandy coast by the Allied Forces.

No other words need to be said.  "D-Day" is all that is needed to evoke the boldness, the bravery, and the horror of that day.

I do however recommend that if you are ever in the Roanoke, Virginia area, a visit to the nearby town of Bedford and the National D-Day Memorial is highly suggested.  Bedford lost more sons at Normandy than any other town in America, which is why it was chosen to be the site of the memorial.  Here are some pics I took when we visited it in 2012...

 

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Tammy and me at Kitty Hawk

Today is the 120th anniversary of the first powered air flight, by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk on the  Outer Banks of North Carolina.

In May of 2017, not long after coming back east after nearly a year of traveling across America, I took my dog Tammy on a day trip to the Outer Banks.  I wanted her to be able to say (to other dogs anyway) that she has seen the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.  We drove down to Cape Hatteras and visited the lighthouse, then went back north.  We spent a little while at the Wright Brothers monument, and got our photo taken at the spot where that very first airplane flight took off from:

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DOOM is thirty years old today!

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release.

It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game - the shareware version - to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be players crashed the school's system as everyone and their brother (and a few sisters) tried to get Doom.  Hours later and campuses around the world were banning the game's network play capability, it was such a resource hog.

By the end of that first day it was very obviously clear: the world was Doomed.  It wasn't long afterward that the id Software staff started getting sales of the full game to the tune of a hundred THOUSAND dollars a day.

And it wasn't just the high school and college crowd that was playing Doom: it was people from all walks of life.  Young and old.  Students and professionals.  Especially when it came to the game's revolutionary multiplayer component.  Doom was the great leveler after death itself.  In a perfect world there would be no wars: only games of Doom to prove one's skill.

My first exposure to Doom came a few months later, when a friend brought over a box containing the shareware version that he had found at K-Mart for like a dollar.  This was still a time when most homes in America didn't have Internet and consequently no FTP access, so id also distributed the shareware edition in boxes for the cost of packaging.  Johnny's own computer was having problems running it, but maybe mine would.  We were sharing rides to the community college for a history class on Tuesday nights.  After I returned home that evening I installed Doom on the 486-SX system that I had gotten for Christmas.

Doom was a little overwhelming at first.  Also plenty violent.  I didn't honestly know what to make of it when I initially cranked it up, and there was school work and my job at the nearby seafood restaurant for most of the weekend.  But on Sunday afternoon I gave Doom another shot.  It sucked me in hard and refused to let go.  I was firing at anything and everything that moved.  By the time I found the chainsaw I was grinning like a maniac.  Dad walked past my door and looked in to see what I was doing.  He saw me blasting those Imps away with the shotgun and just sort-of shook his head in disbelief.  Later on he watched me sawing into the demons and I like to think he found it pretty amusing.  Just as I was finding that killing off hordes of the undead was a GREAT stress reliever after all.

It wasn't long after that when I sent a check off to Texas.  A week or so later the full version of Doom - containing version 1.666 - arrived at my door.  By that time I had conquered "Knee Deep In The Dead" many times on the various difficulties.  Now it was time at last to wade upon "The Shores Of Hell" on my way to "Inferno".

And then came the discovery that id Software had made the game almost completely customizable!  People had figured out how to create their own levels, edit and add-in new graphics, change up the sounds and music... pretty much anything pertaining to the game's environment.  That first night I tried an add-on, when I UNZIP-ped a WAD (acronym for "Where's All the Data?") file and changed the Baron of Hell into Barney the Dinosaur... that just lit a fire under me to find and collect EVERY add-on file that I could locate.  I think my favorite custom level was "Deimos Subway": a very well-designed board imitating a train station along with a catchy tune for background music.  There was the WAD that added sounds from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  And there is also no forgetting the various WADs that added classical MIDI music to the game.  All very clever (and often very funny) stuff.  Although I kind of harbor doubts that many people these days would be comfortable with loading the COSBY.WAD before starting the game...

Wow.  Thirty years.  So much has happened both in personal time and across the realm of video/computer gaming.  But even today, that first one-third of Doom is with us as much as ever.  Ports of the game have been made for everything from calculators to refrigerator doors to home pregnancy tests to John Deere tractors.  It's become an unofficial mantra of the coding sector: "It's not a computer if it doesn't run Doom."

And I would be remiss if I did not admit that every so often I find myself playing original Doom again.  There's just something about this game that charms the player and leaves an indelible mark on one's cerebral pleasure center.  I've played a lot of so-called "Doom-clones", but it's the original game which the game-oriented part of my personal entertainment proclivity owes its allegiance to.

Time has proven that it is true: "Doom will never die.  Only its players will."

So Happy Thirtieth Birthday to Doom!  May we be playing it for another thirty!

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One day, this will be mine (I hope!)

See this?  It's an enlargement.  The originals are about the size of modern printed currency...

 

I first saw this at a Boy Scout camporee in September of 1985.  I was a brand new full Boy Scout.  They were handing out life-size copies of this: A ten shilling note used during the Siege of Mafeking during the Boer War in South Africa.

It dates back to 1900.  Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, who later started the entire Scouting movement, had these printed up and used in place of scarce real currency.  After the siege was lifted and true money started flowing again these were redeemable for actual ten shilling coins.

My friend and grandfather figure Doc Lewis told me about all that.  The “shillings” they were handing out during the camping event were copies of an actual siege note that our local Boy Scout council had in its possession.

I’ve been fascinated by this note ever since.  So much so that I resolved to someday own a real one.  It’s still a dream of mine.

I found some really good pics of Mafeking siege notes and then printed this one out.

It’s been on the wall next to my computer desk I’m writing this from for awhile now.  It’s become a source of inspiration for me. Baden-Powell held out in Mafeking for 217 days until relief finally arrived.

If he could do that with limited supplies, maybe I can hold out a little while longer for whatever God may have for me.  I hope so.

And hey, how many currencies in world history have soldiers manning cannons and machine guns printed on them?  That alone makes this note pretty cool!

If I ever can finish and sell my book, I’m going to buy a real ten shilling note from the Mafeking siege and frame it and put it on my living room wall.

I think that would be pretty neat.

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Commentary: The Boredom Machine

Ruins of the Capitol
from the video game Fallout 3

It's been several hours since some semblance of a historical event transpired here in America: Kevin McCarthy was ousted from being Speaker of the House in the House of Representatives.  It's the first time that's ever happened.  McCarthy is now third place in being shortest term of office for a speaker.

I've taken a peak at some of the more prominent online news and politics forums.  And this has obviously been an event arousing considerable discussion, anger, and triumph.

But the best I've been able muster up is an indifferent shrug. 

Once upon a time, I would be following the ouster of Kevin McCarthy with intense interest.  It IS the very first time in American history that a House speaker has been tossed out of the position, after all.  In days past my eyes and ears would be absorbing every scrap of information about what is now happening, collating it all in my brain as fast as it could possibly be done.

But I'm older now.  Presumably wiser.  And definitely more world-weary than three decades ago.  I've seen "leaders" and their parties swept into and out of power for so long, with very little lasting good for the nation, that I'm just plain bored with it all.

Heh.  "I'm so bored with it all."  Those were the final words of Winston Churchill, you might be enlightened to know.

It's much worse now.  The utter mundanity of modern politics.  Especially modern American politics.

I think Donald Trump was the first really brilliant flash of invigoration since Ronald Reagan.  But Trump ultimately failed to counter and rein in the overly-burdensome entrenched institutionalized wickedness that our government has become.  He accomplished some good - the border wall is, or would be anyway, one example - but he surrounded himself with people whose allegiances were with "the machine".  They were not loyal to the American people and their republic.

And now we see "the machine" bearing down on Trump, doing its damndest to squash any possibility of his re-election and retribution.  Take heed, friends and neighbors!  This is what "the machine" can do and will do to any and all challengers to its power and influence.  It will quash its dissidents like vermin... because that's all that we are to them.  Trump?  He's just the biggest person to make an example of.  I can tick off many others who have been besieged and destroyed by the machine for their insolence.

Don't think I'm a Trump uberfan.  You'll never catch me dead in a "Make America Great Again" cap.  I don't have political idols to follow.  But I damn well know what an all-out war to destroy an individual in almost every conceivable way looks like.  If it can happen to one person, it can happen to anyone at all.

This is what modern American politics is not just becoming, it already is.  It has turned into the very thing that our fathers and grandfathers for over two hundred years have fought to keep our country from becoming.

We all know it, even if we refuse to admit it.

This country has wound up with a lifelong chronic liar and a political prostitute in its two highest offices.  And we are supposed to applaud that?

There is now much more spying on regular citizens than the Stasi ever were capable of.  The propaganda of "the machine" has powers that Goebbels never imagined.  Silencing dissent has become a science to the priests of power.

The Internet?  I would tell you to search Google for evidence that its algorithms are biased against all but leftist people and policies, but it's algorithms don't allow for that.  Only a token few results are let slip by.  The machine controls the search engines.  Right now only Twitter is an isle of freedom of ideas and information... but God only knows how long that will last.  Social media?  The day will soon come when I and multitudes of others won't be allowed to post these things.  We'll probably have our accounts deleted.  Made unpersons.  As if we never existed on the Internet at all.  I genuinely wonder if the blog I've maintained for almost twenty years will one day be deleted.  Just one reason why I keep regular backups of it.

Entertainment?  Let's just say I am not a Disney+ subscriber.  I doubt I ever will be.  And I genuinely hate to say that.

All of this and more... much, much more... have turned America into a dreary landscape of tedium and turmoil, populated with spineless thralls.  There is no more vigor on display in this land.  Only the machine and its attendants and the ashen waste they continue to make of our nation.

McCarthy?  His ouster is just one minor episode in the scheme of things.  Nothing substantial will change.  Nothing will be allowed to change.  Not with the machine in control of very nearly everything.

I'm bored with the machine and everything about it.

You want vigor again?  You want real excitement?  You want serious change?

Be of good cheer then.  It is coming, sooner or later.  It is inevitable.  The machine can not survive forever.  It will eventually run out of willing slaves.

And then the blood will flow.  As high as the horses' bridles.

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Germany 1943 or America 2023?

Found something last night while doing historical research.  It absolutely floored me to read this passage.  It could be referring to the America of today:

 

Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend and collaborator Christoph Probst wrote six leaflets in defiance of their government.  The three members of the "White Rose" were caught in February 1943 in Munich, Germany.  Four days later they were put on trial for crimes against the state.  It was a show trial, led by the infamous Nazi judge Roland Freisler.  

The three were declared guilty.  A few hours later the Scholls and Probst were executed by guillotine.

Sophie Scholl was twenty-one years old.

 

"History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes." ~ George Lucas

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All that I will likely say about former President Donald Trump being indicted

 

Kindly allow me to boil down certain recent events into something that can be readily grasped. And I say this as someone who has never voted for Trump and likely never will.

The people applauding former President Donald Trump's indictments don't know what the (BLEEP) they are cheering for.

 

The United States is entering a dark place. We have already been poised to cross that line for a very long time. Now it is barreling headlong into the cave.

 

America is headed for grief.

 

And idiots are clapping and howling in delight as we do.

 

This is about larger matters than "we gotta get Trump". But the ones screaming loudest probably don't want to be bothered to be concerned for that.  What is befalling the former president right now is not the disease itself, but a symptom.  And I would be saying that regardless of who is being targeted.

 

I'm writing this, as I often do write, because I want nothing to do with what's to come. I've done my part and am still doing my part to encourage people to turn aside from their foolishness.  I saw what's coming even as a teenager and for more than thirty years, I've tried to get people to think about the disaster that will befall us.  Many of them haven't thought about it at all.

 

What is to transpire is not on my hands, but theirs.

 

Just my .02

 

 

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Happy Independence Day America

The scene from the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams where Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the delegates vote to declare American secession from Britain:

I have to believe that the mood of the room following the vote for the Declaration of Independence in real life was no less solemn.  The look on their faces must have said it all: "Dear God, we just did that.  That just happened!  What have we done?!"

May we come to again honor those men who pledged their fortunes, their integrity, and their very lives so as to give us the blessings of liberty.

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May it never be forgot

Seventy-nine years ago today.

That's a still from the animated special What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?  It was the follow-up to the film Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown.  Charlie Brown Linus, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, and Snoopy are on their way back to America.  They stop and camp for the night and Linus thinks they're something familiar about the place.

Wow.  That premiered forty years ago last week.  It's well worth tracking down and watching.

Remembering all who came ashore at Normandy on this day nearly eighty years ago.

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The Storm of the Century: Thirty years later...

It was this day, March the 12^th, thirty years ago.

I was eighteen, taking first year classes at the local community college.  I worked part time at Subway, but I didn’t have to go in that night.  About 4 that Friday afternoon Dad asked if I wanted to ride with him to Ridgeway, across the state line in Virginia.  There was this little convenience store there that EVERYONE in Rockingham County seemed to go to when they played the lottery.  I said sure, I’d come along.  It was a cold and cloudy day for mid March.

Looking back, I now recall the sound of the air around us before we hopped into the truck.  It had a very muffled characteristic.  I hadn’t heard air like that in a long time.  That should have been the first clue, about what had already begun to transpire.

We got back home a little over an hour later.  And as I got out of Dad’s truck I saw it: the first flakes of snow.  Something we had not seen fall in three years.

Well, two nights earlier at Boy Scout leadership training, the scoutmaster of my troop made a halfway-joking reference to the weather for the next few days.  How there may be snow.  I didn’t really take him seriously.

But here it was.  Snow.  And more flakes were starting to come down.

It didn’t stop.  It was only falling harder.  By 6:30 the ground was almost completely covered.  We drove to Short Sugar’s in Reidsville a little while later to pick up my sister, who was working there.  She drove cautiously behind our car.  By that point it was undeniably the harshest snowfall that we had seen in quite some time.  I don’t know how Mom drove through that as she did.  We could barely see the highway at all.  But we got back home, a little after 9.

The snow was still falling when I looked out the kitchen door about midnight.

It hadn’t stopped falling when we woke up.  And it continued on and on throughout the day.  No one was driving on our road.  There was nowhere to go.  I had to call my manager and tell her I couldn’t get to Subway tonight.  Saturday afternoon brought the wind.  It sounded like a hurricane.  And it blew the flakes hard against the side of the house.  There was zero visibility if anyone was so daring as to try to get out in that mess.

The power stayed on at our house.  The same could not be said for several hundred thousands of others throughout the area, including one television station in Greensboro that went off the air.  The ABC station was hardly functioning, which I remember because there was something coming on that night that I had been looking forward to catching and the signal barely penetrated the storm.

It was weather on an almost apocalyptic scale.  I finally fell asleep probably around 2 a.m., the wind still howling and barraging the house with frozen precipitation.

Finally, Sunday morning dawned.  The wind had ceased.  The first real sunlight in two days revealed our home, the fields around it, our cars, the trees… everything covered by a pure unspoiled brilliant
blinding white sheet of snow nearly two feet deep.  I got out of the house for a little while to get some fresh air and behold it all.  Our cocker spaniel puppy, Bridget, went out also.  I don’t know how she kept from sinking into the snow.  She looked like a miniature polar bear, she was walking across it so easily.

That was how I experienced the Storm of the Century.  The 1993 Super Storm.  The Great Blizzard of '93.  Whatever you want to call it.  It was a convergence of several weather systems that produced a meteorological monstrosity.  At its height it stretched all the way from Central America to Canada up and across the Eastern Seaboard.  Roughly half the population of the United States was impacted one way or another by the event.  No storm since then has approached it in size and ferocity.

Things had been brought to a standstill for the next few days.  But the weather turned warmer and by Friday all roads were completely passable.  There was only the barest vestige of the blizzard to be found in shady spots as I drove back from the Boy Scout camp the following Sunday morning, at the conclusion of leadership training.

The Storm of the Century was thirty years ago.  But I still think of it, whenever it snows.  I’ve no doubt that many who are reading this will also remember where they were during those several days in March of 1993, when winter showed us that it wasn’t finished yet.

 

 

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No, I do not "hate" anyone LGBT

Sigh...

I shouldn't have to make this post.  But as it seems how EVERYTHING today is supposed to be qualified, quantified, factionalized and most especially sexualized...

Contrary to what some have claimed, I do not now nor have I ever harbored any kind of hatred toward those who have chosen the homosexual lifestyle.  Or who are bisexual.  Or transsexual.  Or whatever.

As a Christian, I am called to not hate anybody.  I am in fact commanded to hate my own sin and my own fallen carnal nature, before I dare levy hatred toward another.  It is part and parcel to the "dying unto self" that those who follow Christ are told that they must do on a daily basis.

That does not mean however that I can or must acquiesce to any activity that is self-destructive.

And that, is what LGBT behavior is.

I've seen the damage and disease and ultimately death that is wrought by homosexuality.  Have looked at the photos of lacerated anal tissue.  Viewed images of penises wracked with things that no healthy male should have.  I have read the journal articles, about gay men and lesbians being far more prone to cancer than those who are not.  Human papillomavirus is a really nasty thing to subject one's genitalia to.  I have looked into the faces of people who have contracted full-blown AIDS, and those are eyes that I pray I never have to look into ever again.

Homosexuals have, on average, a lifespan twenty years shorter than that of heterosexuals.

Let that sink in.  A gay or lesbian person is likely to have two full decades shaven off their life expectancy, because of the all too physical consequences of homosexual behavior.

These are not things that can be "wished away" for sake of sexual license.  These are stone cold hard facts.  This is reality, that can NOT be escaped from because of one's "feelings" about the matter.

LGBTwhatever is incompatible with human design.  Its myriad of associated diseases and disorders attest to this.

How do I, as a person called by God Himself to love others, reconcile that love with the expectation that I am to celebrate a "lifestyle" that leads so very often to death?

I can not.  I can no more endorse the LGBT community than I can endorse cigarette smoking, or abusing crystal meth.  Because those are self-destructive behaviors also.

I can love homosexuals.  I can love lesbians. I can love bisexual individuals.  I can love transsexuals, though what they do to themselves is especially haunting.

But as a Christian (who fails and falls more often than not), as an objectivist who understands the concreteness of reality, as merely a human being trying to be decent... for those reasons and more, I can not love their kind of behavior.  Because when you scrape away everything else that's Chris Knight, you're left with someone who simply does not want to see anyone die.

No, "love is love" is not true.  There are many kinds of love.  There is philios: love of brothers and sisters.  There is the love of parents to children.  There is logos: the love of God.  And, yes, there is eros: love expressed sexually between man and woman.

What the LGBT community and its supporters demand we accept is not love at all.  It is lust.  And they want said lust to be without the burden of personal responsibility.  And THAT again is a denial of reality.

If you love a person... and I mean really love someone, you will NOT selfishly lead that person to demean themselves for your own desires, at risk of their health and even very life.

I love my friends.  There are men who are as close and dear to me as real brothers.  I love them and I would die for any of them.  But not for an instant have I been tempted to take it to an entirely different and inappropriate level.

Once upon a time, not very long ago, most men and women were capable of accepting that.  That love is a many dimension-ed notion and that each kind had its own unique place in the scheme of things.

We were a better people, then.  Not a perfect people.  But we were at least striving against the baser instincts of carnal nature.  And we accomplished great things because of it.

As a historian, I know also where unrestrained sexual pleasure leads a society to.  And that as much as anything else persuades me about the truly insidious nature of the LGBT lifestyle.

I could easily sit here all night, and rattle off a dozen reasons and more why I can not celebrate homosexuality and transgenderism.  Just as easily as I could tick off all the reasons why I must condemn it.

And I hope that my many friends who are LGBT will at last understand where I'm coming from.

Finally, know this: sex is a sacred, holy thing.  It is something that I believe should be celebrated within the boundaries of husband and wife.  In my sincere philosophy ALL sexual sin is equally abhorrent.  I can not disapprove of LGBT behavior any more than I can of sex outside of marriage.  That makes me come across as a prude, I know.  But there it is.  I have plenty of friends who do not agree with this.  And that is fine.  But so far as I know none of them have called me "hate-filled" or "polygamaphobe" because of it.

Sex is not a toy.  It's not something to be engaged in frivolously.  It is meant to be a sanctified act.  "The marriage bed is to be honored by all," scripture tells us.  If that was done more often, maybe we wouldn't have things like children without fathers, venereal disease and shortened lifespans.

That is all.

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Lenten Blogging 2022: Day 28

Russia's invasion of Ukraine may go down as the textbook example of all the wrong ways to try to take over a neighboring country.  I'm reading the reports (whichever ones may be accurate) and it just blows my mind how unprepared Putin was in sending his forces into Ukraine.

First of all: WHY did Russia commit its forces during the winter?  The vehicles have gotten bogged down in mud and mire, just as any armchair strategist knew would happen.  But this seems to be the classic pattern for Russia.

There does not seem to be a reliable system of replenishing food, ammo and replacement artillery.

Speaking of that artillery, there are reports that the Ukrainians have more tanks now than when the war began, because they keep capturing Russian tanks and painting Ukrainian markings on them.

The Russian trucks and other vehicles in the invasion convoys have shoddy tires, and other problem parts, which can arguably be traced back to corruption among the oligarchs.  These are NOT sturdy pieces of equipment they road to war on.

The fight to take Kiev is now approximately three weeks behind schedule.

Odessa and other cities along the Black Sea coast have not been taken.

There are widespread accounts of Russian soldiers giving up.  Morale has collapsed.

The Russian army has now lost more personnel than it did during ten years of occupying Afghanistan.

 Russia continues to be ostracized by most countries.  Putin has blown thirty years of building up goodwill, for sake of a war he cannot possibly win.

All of these reasons and more, are going to be studied at great length in history books sooner than later.  Russia is NOT the great power that it claims to be or ever was.  And it's going to take decades to undoe the damage of this debacle.  The best thing to happen now is for Putin to step aside... or  be made to step aside.

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Maybe the last real post I make about this election

The following post isn't going to endear me to some people.  Indeed, I removed it for awhile after it drew fire from some who I greatly respect.  I sincerely hope that, as Thomas Jefferson beautifully put it, this will be no reason to depart from friendship.

I am a historian and an observer of human nature.  And what comes now, is from a place I earnestly believe is an objective perch.  Or at least, I try to be objective.  I will write this and let future readers decide on the merits of this essay.  Because that's who I've always written for as much as those in the here and now.

 Ready?  Here goes:

My friends and family are well aware of a policy I have regarding elections.  It is very simple: I do not vote for a candidate who creates and broadcasts a negative campaign commercial aimed at an opponent.  And I keep to that no matter what.

Its genesis came about as a result of my running for board of education in 2006, and those wacky campaign ads I created.  Especially the "Star Wars" one.  There were three ads total.  None of them went negative.  Indeed, the third and final one was an "anti-negative ad" in response to another candidate's going all nasty.

I think I knew going in that I wasn't going to get elected (though with coming in 8th place out of 16 candidates, I nearly pulled it off).  But I was determined to make the campaign all my own.  To make people remember me long after the results came that night.  And I learned something from the experience: When you choose NOT to be negative, you become that much more creative.  You find ideas that you otherwise might have missed completely.

So long story short: I didn't vote for either of the two presidential frontrunners this past month.  They each blew their shot with me early on.

As I said, I keep to my policy no matter how much I may approve of how well a candidate has done in office.

Donald Trump?  I've never been a devotee of the man.  You'll never find me wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap.  But I can and do recognize the good that the man accomplished in less than four years.  He did a lot to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.  He strengthened our borders.  Even now he's doing much to pull our men and women out of foreign wars they no longer belong in.  I could name a dozen or so things that the historian of my nature must admit are Trump's successes.

And no matter which man it was who was chosen by the people of the United States, I was going to support them and wish them well.  I would say that about anyone elected to such a high office.  Yes, even Biden.

That was assuming that the election was fair, without any evidence of impropriety.

But that is not the case, in the matter of the 2020 presidential election.

Indeed, the evidence has mounted from the wee hours of the morning following the election that there was a massive amount of impropriety.  I could recount them all here but Patrick Basham - among many others - has documented the puzzling irregularities better than I could.

And now?  I don't believe that Joseph Biden defeated Donald Trump.  And in a sane world I have no doubt that what Trump's attorneys are doing in pursuing every angle would fail to demonstrate that.

But it's not a sane world.

It is a corrupted world.  In ever facet of our culture.  Especially in our politics and our news media.  Oh bruddah, the things I could say about the media.  It almost makes me ashamed that I used to be a news journalist at all.

I'm enough of a realist to understand that come January 20th it's going to be Biden who takes the oath of office.

But I'm also enough of an observer of human nature to know that if Biden did indeed cheat, he isn't going to get away with it.

I remember the day the jury returned "not guilty" at O.J. Simpson's murder trial.  Our entire campus erupted in gasps of disbelief.  Nobody could believe that he had gotten away with it.  But as I told some fellow students: O.J. didn't get away with it.  "Someday, somehow, it will catch up with him. Maybe not in ways that we will ever see, but there will be justice meted out."

I see the same thing happening with Biden and Harris.

Oh yes, they are flush with victory now.  But the fact remains that there are between 70 and 80 million who did not vote for them.  And as the evidence of voter fraud grows, it's emboldening an asterisk next to Biden's name in the history books.

Personally, I don't see Biden lasting more than a year on the job.  Much less two.  He certainly will not run for re-election.

If this election was all on the up-and-up, I would be supporting Biden in his capacity as president.

But as things are now... I can't.  I just can't.  And neither will a lot of other Americans.

If there is a silver lining in all of this, it's that I believe in America enough to know that she bounces back from the worst.  Winston Churchill once remarked that the American people can always be counted upon to do the right thing after trying everything else and failed.

If there has been any wrongdoing at all in this election, it will not escape judgment.  I had no idea about Lyndon Johnson's "box 13" during his 1948 run for U.S. Senate.  But now?  He's an even bigger asshole than I originally thought.  Johnson is not well revered in the annals of modern American history.  And with each passing decade he is reviled more and more.

That is what I see happening to anyone who come to office as a result of fraud.

Joseph Biden may have wanted to be President.  But it may well be that sooner than later he will discover that wanting a thing is far different than having a thing.

 Again, speaking personally: I believe we are heading toward disaster.  There was no broad and unassailable mandate in Biden winning.  And as the evidence of vote massaging grows it's going to turn more and more people off from supporting Biden in any way.  He is set to become the most ill-regarded and unpopular President in any living memory.

I hope that I am wrong.

 

 

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Richard "The Carpenter": Twelve generations of Knights

 Dad used to tell me that he didn't want to study our family tree too much.  "There's going to be someone there who wore a rope for a necktie", he would say.  In most part Dad was content with knowing his grandfather, Samuel Knight - born in 1887 - and not much further.

(Samuel's wife, Maggie Warren, was born in 1880 and died in 1979.  I'm old enough to remember her in her final years... and that's a pretty neat thing, to have known someone who knew Civil War veterans and was a young lady when the Wright Brothers flew their plane.)

With not much else to do with my own time these past several months, I thought it would be intriguing if I started to research our family history.  Quietly praying that there wasn't some scoundrel of ill repute back there anywhere.  And now I can say that ours does go back quite a bit and they left a trail behind them.

Knight family cemetery, Rhode Island

So it turns out that I'm the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of one Richard Knight, aka Richard "the Carpenter" Knight.  Born around 1620 in the Norfolk, England area.  He came to the colonies circa 1640, at first in what is today New Hampshire.  But after "some legal trouble" - namely evading the authorities after being charged with theft - Richard left and settled in Rhode Island.  He was a carpenter, a miller, and a deacon.  He was also apparently a veteran of King Philip's War, because of the one hundred acres he was awarded following the conflict.  Richard had two wives, the second being Sarah.

Richard and Sarah had six children.  One of them was David Knight, my grandfather eleven times removed.  And it turns out that many of Richard's immediate male descendants were blacksmiths by trade.

Huh.

Dad was a knifemaker.  He put together most of his equipment, including his forge and his power hammer.  He even welded together the anvil that he would bang and shape the blades on.  He made a lot of knives, more than we realized at the time of his passing.

And now it turns out that though he never knew it, he was following in the footsteps of our remote ancestors.

I've been finding information about some others along the family tree.  One grandfather was Thomas Jefferson Knight, born shortly after the Revolutionary War.  At least one family member fought in the American Revolution itself.  Thomas' brother, Absalom Knight (is that a bad-a$$ name or what?) took part in the War of 1812.  To the best of my research, one of my direct ancestors owned a slave: name unknown.  He willed the slave to his wife following his death.  So, there is that tidbit.   I haven't found any indication that anyone in my direct lineage fought in the Civil War, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone along one of the branches participated.  I say that because North Carolina sent more soldiers than any other state in the Confederacy, and Rockingham County provided more than its share of those soldiers.  So the likelihood that I've an ancestor who fought in the War Between the States is moderately high.

And it all goes back to Richard the Carpenter.  Who came to the New World and it sounds as if he lived an interesting life.

Who knows.  Maybe some bit of prior research eludes me.  And that it may be possible to take the lineage back even further.  But if not, I'll be content to be the scion of Richard the Carpenter.

I hope he would have been satisfied that I've tried to live a life even a little bit as illustrious as his.

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