Planting Trees

The Book I Did Not Write

2011-08-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

It must have been four years ago when I got an email from a guy named Vic. He was researching a story about the lumber industry in the Midwest to the Far West. In doing so he came across one of my family lines and then my name as a submitter of the information.

Vic introduced himself and then began asking questions. It was then that I had to ask myself a question: was I going to write a book about these cousins or not? If not, would I object to letting someone else write their story?

So I didn’t respond to Vic right away. I thought it over for several weeks (while I worked on another book) and then decided to let Vic use my information.

At first, I sent Vic what only he asked for. Then I asked if he knew some strange stories of the deaths of several of my people. He didn’t, so I sent the details and photographs. This led to other questions and materials flying back and forth across the Internet and soon I was learning things about my family. Then I began to look forward to Vic’s emails. I dug deeper into my own piles of papers for him. And then came the announcement: the book was finished. I would be getting a copy in a week or so.

For me, it all began with the murder of my great-grandfather in 1874. I wrote about him and the cowardly backshooting by the KKK in those ugly days after the Civil War. I followed the family afterwards because witnesses against the Klan did not live long and I wanted to see what had happened to them. Three brothers disappeared completely. One had been killed and the other two may have fled to what is now Panama.

A fourth brother, Tom Walker, testified and then fled out west. He had been a shopkeeper at home but out west he started stores and banks to serve settlers in Kansas and Missouri. He died in 1931 as a very wealthy man. His family line ran out in 1967 when his only grandson, a gay man, died young of cancer. It was Tom’s family’s epic tale that I wanted to write about.

It seems Tom Walker had a daughter who married a wealthy young man named Bill Carlisle. The Carlisle family was very big nationally in the lumber industry. The new family soon produced two sons. Tommy was killed by a drunk driver in 1937. The driver died in a mysterious fire soon after. Money from both sides of the family ended up in the hands of Tom Walker’s other grandson, Bill Carlisle.

Bill was very interested in the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, and not the lumber industry. He and his partner would go to New York and would throw parties for the artsy folks. I have a letter at the time of his death that said, “Bill has died. I notified the Roosevelts, Andre Kostelanitz, Rosa Ponselle . . . (and other luminaries of the social set in the 1960’s).” Bill’s partner lives within thirty miles of me at Laguna Beach as I write this, but is very reclusive and will not talk to me.

So Vic wrote a very interesting book about the lumber industry and the people who founded it using most of his own enormous research, but he flavored his interesting work with materials I had sent him. After reading the book, I found I was glad that I had done my family history, glad that it had been useful to someone else, and glad that I had placed their names on the Internet.

Vic is a good, interesting writer. He has the knack of making a well-documented history seem like a novel. Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan and others whose historical works appeared on PBS have that same ability. They are inventing a new genre which fits genealogists needs very nicely.

The name of the book is Onalaska and the author’s full name is Victor J. Kucera. I recommend it as an interesting book by itself, but also as an example of how you can organize and present that genealogy you have in the back of your head. The book has 340 pages plus an appendix, end notes, time line and an index. It will be available in early 2012.

Onalaska is a book I did not write. But I wish I had. I would say more about it but I just discovered a letter my grandmother wrote to Tommy’s mother after the car crash in 1937. Maybe I can get it to Vic so he can include it in the final edition.

One more thing: you just don’t know when the material you collected is going to be useful to you or to someone else. That is why it is worth the effort to be the “expert” on your family and to have the information handy. And it is useful to let someone on the Internet know that you have it.

Unconventional Wisdom

2011-04-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

The following appeared on my friend Leland Meitzler's Genealogy Blog (http://www.genealogyblog.com/). I wrote it so I have permission to use it.

One of the dot com book companies sent me a small book of poems by my favorite author, Wendell Berry.* In one short poem Wendell described a Thomas Fiske method of doing genealogy that I thought was particularly useful. He wrote about his gratitude for his children and grandchildren and then said:

At our dinners together, the dead
Enter and pass among us
In living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

I showed the poem to my wife Evie, and tears came to her eyes as she thought of her pretty daughter Julie, who was killed by a drunk driver on the eve of her wedding some twenty years ago. We have often talked about Julie with the grandchildren at the dinner table.

In the author’s artful description, not only is ancestry passed on but also it is used to teach the young. I cannot write how many times my family meals were conducted this way, in which “the dead enter(ed) and pass(ed) among us” as someone told a story about a person from the past.

It is a good thing the dead don’t eat much, because many of these meals were conducted during the Great Depression or during WWII when food was scarce. But no matter how hungry I was, I always remembered the stories my parents or grandparents told. Now that my children are getting older they remind me that I told them stories as well.

I am forced to wonder how much damage I did by telling the “racier” stories about my two older brothers and me rather than the stories in which we helped someone or showed some kindness.

But that is water under the bridge. Having a long memory, I became the family genealogist and put my parents’ stories to good use. I hope my grandchildren will save those tales for their kids. All things considered, I managed to make the stories into learning experiences in which I passed on part of the American culture. Maybe the dead paused long enough to approve.

Of course they heard stories “in living love” because they were family and when I tell stories, family members always wear white hats - maybe hats with footprints on them or with holes through the crowns because we had our share of screwballs. But always they had white hats because they were the good guys.

I kind of forgot the other kind of stories.

*Berry, Wendell, Leavings. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011, p.41

JFK's Joke on the American People

2011-02-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

After at least four years of research and writing, I completed a book about President Kennedy’s joke on the US people. He truly did send a space medicine scientist, one of the few the US had, to the USSR to help keep their cosmonauts alive. JFK did not live long afterwards, but Presidents Johnson and Nixon carried on the program. Apparently, they did not tell Congress.

Premier Khrushchev of the USSR had to be in agreement, of course. He was ousted in 1964, so Premier Brezhnev had a choice to make. He chose to keep the program intact. The scientist secretly flew back and forth to the USSR for about nine years, while the US was competing with the USSR to be first to send a man to the moon.

I knew the space medicine scientist, who died a few years ago. After I wrote the book, I sent a letter to one of his children, also a scientist, saying that the book was on the market but that I had altered the scientist’s name and home city.

A few weeks ago I got a letter from a child of the scientist. It was very informative. He did not know I had written the book and he did not know what his father had been up to. Here is what he said, in part:

Dear Mr. Fiske,

On the advice of my sibling, I have read your book The Insider. Needless to say, the content left me floored. I had no idea that my father led a double life as our country strove to put a man on the moon. My next reaction is to thank you for helping to fill in some of the blanks of my father’s life. He was remarkably careful in what he would tell us about his work and it was clear that he had a lot more to say. Without your patient and persistent interviews the story would have died with him. I am very grateful that you were willing to take the time and personal risk and write your book. A couple years prior to his death I had arranged for a physiologist working on the history of space flight to interview Dad. His health was already failing and his Parkinson’s (disease) made communication difficult. Dad refused to meet with the physiologist and I always regretted the opportunity missed. I should have known that Dad would have arranged for an interview on his terms.

The interview was with me. I am not a physiologist, however. Nor did I intend to write about the scientist. While I got a crash course in physiology from the scientist, little of it “took.” I am an MBA and more of a student of management and an economist that a medicine man. I never liked biology and its off-shoots. Once the scientist had told someone about his adventure, he said nothing to anyone else. I was working under the theory that his children knew what their father had accomplished, but the letter tells me I was wrong.

It appears that his wife knew and I knew. She was also my friend. But in this country, we three knew alone knew of the very brave things the scientist accomplished. Of course, two Intel agencies knew, but it all took place over forty years ago, and most of them are dead or retired by now. Newer staff doesn’t care and is busy working on other problems. Still, no one in our Government is giving up any information, willingly. The Russians know and have long memories. They would rather not let the world know that they had important assistance from the US when they were setting all kinds of records in space. It is not a time of ease at my house.

I called the book The Insider: NASA’s Man at Baikonur. It is available at the usual dot com book stores.

Scheherazade and New Podcasts

2010-09-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

Having spent most of the day trying to give Itunes an address of my podcast, I am somewhat exhausted. What a complicated mess their web page is! I would rather file my 1986 income taxes again than tackle their web pages once more.

The podcast is a series of stories I tell from my book “Four on the Floor.” After I left industry, I spent a few years teaching math and science in public schools as a sub. It was fun for me and the kids were generally great to work with. There were times when the lesson was over and the bell had not rung. I used those times to tell stories about my kids or my brothers, or exotic stories from science or history.

And kid love gore. For instance, they loved to hear about the time my older brother blew his big toe off with a shotgun. That was a gun safety story. There was a reason for each of these tales. Kids always want to know why you tell a story.

Of course, the kids asked me to write my stories (I suppose that was so they could tell them to their kids). Eventually I did just that and now, nine books later, I’ve about decided to quit writing. If you want to hear one of my stories you can go to the right side of this page to Links and click the words “Four on the Floor Podcasts.” Read by the author.

Scheherazade was the best story teller there ever was, with her Arabian Nights stories, much better than I. But she was highly motivated. My only motivation was to pass along the art of story telling to a bunch of kids, just to let them know there was something more interesting in life than TV. I may have convinced a few.

Unintended Consequences

2010-08-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Congress often passes laws that have unintended consequences. The sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a paper about the subject as early as 1936. Some of unintended consequences are serendipitous, but others are negative or perverse. It seems that Congress has a way of introducing negative or perverse consequences.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was designed to increase revenues for America and protect American jobs, but it almost single-handedly destroyed the world’s economy. And was it President Clinton’s administration that caused taxes to be raised on luxury boats? The result was that the poor guys who made boats were suddenly out of work.

Individuals can cause unintended consequences as well. When I began to write my book, The Insider I had no ill will against anyone. Yet, as the book is about to appear on the market, I found I have caused damage to a great American astronaut. I had no such intention.

It was in 2002 that General and astronaut Thomas Stafford produced his book, We Have Capture. It is a good book and I recommend it. The General is an American hero. Unfortunately, Stafford thought he was the first American to reach the secret Soviet launch station called Baikonur in April of 1975. He said so in his book.

General Stafford was not at all the first American to reach that space launch station. If it were not central to my book, I would have said nothing, but my book is about the guy who did get there first, and why he went there.

The Insider is about Tad Benson, MD, a space medicine scientist. President Kennedy got him to agree (through Hugh Dryden) to go to both Moscow and Baikonur to share ideas on space medicine. Oh, I know there are lots of people who said Khrushchev and Kennedy never reached an agreement on this subject, but they are wrong. Benson spent almost nine years traveling back and forth to the USSR, doing what he could to keep both cosmonauts and astronauts alive in space.

I knew Benson. He was a serious man a good friend who died too early. I checked with various agencies of the federal government to find out what he was doing during the years 1962-1971, and found that Benson had been a contractor to the NSA, CIA, NASA and other groups. I found that he also got an award from the USSR for his work.

There was a stranger on Gen Stafford’s plane to Siberia. He was on the bus when it arrived at the launch station. Stafford did not mention that Soviet scientists hugged and otherwise ganged up around the stranger, slapping him on the back and ignoring the other Americans. Tad told me about it, and the story appeared elsewhere in the Internet. Tad said that the other scientists wondered, “How did the Soviets know this guy?” but they were never told.

So I told the story in my book The Insider, with as much detail as I could. Tad was dying as he told me and we did not have a whole lot of time. I did not set out to take any of the glory that General Stafford richly deserves. But I did want to tell Tad’s story because I am one of the few in the world who knows it. And my health isn’t all that great.

The really sad part of the story about Tad and his heroic adventures is that I am not allowed to use his real name.

Turning in My Quill Pen and Ink

2010-06-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

It takes a lot of perseverance to write a book. I should know because I have finished ten of the things. It would have been easy, so easy to lay a half-written book aside and promise myself I would get back to it some day. And then wait for that day to come. It never comes, you know. I had to be motivated.

Most of the books I wrote were non-fiction. They contained stories that I knew had to be told. Just had to be told before I kicked the bucket. No one else could have told those stories. I may have made some of those stories into fiction for various reasons (there are always reasons for not publishing a story including “it might offend someone”).

Making them into fiction is just a slight extra demand on the author. Some of us are mere reporters and do not know how to do anything but list events and the people who caused them. There is very little challenge in just reporting.

Anyway, at almost the end of my trail, I think I’ll quit writing books. Even though there’s some modest glory in being America’s least-read writer, I don’t care. I only know that on my bookshelf is a collection of nine, soon to be ten, books. And lots of articles as well. I wrote them.

As I said, the stories had to be told. Not telling them created pressure. Now the pressure is off.

The books are like paintings. You can look at them and like them or not like them. It doesn’t matter. They are there, ten books that weren’t anywhere fifteen years ago. They contain ideas and remembrances and historical details for any and all to see. What’s more, the books are edifying and nearly every word is spelled correctly.

There was a time when I was just starting out in the literary world at age seven. In those days my goal was to read a complete book. It was hard to read them all the way through and I knew I would be proud of myself if I could concentrate long enough just to read every page. Eventually I reached that goal and that began my life-long love of books.

How many times did I wander into my college’s book store and smell the wonderful aroma of paper and paste and whatever it is that makes a new book smell so good? My romance over the years never flagged.

Sometime during my college experience, though, I began to look at books differently. There was a time when, if I didn’t understand a book, I would put it down and think I was too dumb. After my MBA degree, the truth hit me: if I could not understand a book, I would lay it aside and say to myself, “That author can’t write.” But I still loved books. They had to be well written, however.

During my first fifty years never did I dream I would be able to write a book. I did not even want to write one because I realized I was not of the writer class, I was of the reader class. Most of us are that way. But then I turned over several rocks in my family history foundation and there they were—the stories that had to be told.

Now I have done my duty. I have told the stories of murder and war and struggle during WWII followed by the Space Race and the Cold War. It is someone else’s turn. I will not listen to any more stories, much less tell them. Now I am content to read very well written books, preferably new ones that have crisp clean pages.

Don’t offer me something on the Internet. I hate computer screens. I just want to turn pages and look at black words on white pages, words that can bring back memories or cause me to dream great dreams. I think I have earned that privilege.
It may take a lot of perseverance not to write another book, but I believe I will win out.

I think the literary world will survive. After all, I still have my blog to work on, and the Genealogy blog as well, and maybe an engineering magazine or two.

On Producing a Book

2010-05-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Anybody can write a book. Producing a book is very hard. It is right up there with producing a new product for a large company such as General Electric. I have done both and I am not sure which is more difficult.

A new appliance starts with the drawings and specifications. From these you have tools made and you buy equipment that holds the tools. You design the tests and find space for the rest of the production facilities including assembly lines. You make sure pilot models work as they are made on equipment you will use in actual production. And you assure that the boxes they are sold in are made correctly, fit the product and look good.

Authors would be well-served if they had a mental image of the finished product sitting on their shelves. They need a rough idea of the plot, but must be flexible. Characters do not always do what you want them to do. So plot changes will probably occur. A new book requires front and back covers, well-edited text, pictures of acceptable quality, readable type size with the correct font. Covers do sell books, you know. Chapters must be appropriately ended. A book is in fact a list of details that must be accomplished before it can be completed. Tables of contents and indexes must be prepared. There seem to be no end of concerns for you to handle personally before the book is ready for production.

Finally, each author of a new book is an entrepreneur, trying to sell copies in the face of stiff competition from many other authors with the same idea. But if he has a good story, he will never be at rest until he has written it and has seen the book on people’s shelves.

In spite of all this, I have completed my last book. I named it The Insider. It is a novel about an American doctor who spent nine years flying into and out of the USSR during the Space Race when the US and USSR were competing with each other to be the first to land a man on the moon. President John F. Kennedy got Premier Khrushchev of the USSR to allow a NASA doctor to visit the USSR’s secret space launch site about 1963 in spite of problems in Cuba and other US-USSR conflicts. These two world leaders were looking far ahead in the space business.

All the experts say it did not happen. But it did and the man they sent was a friend. The few Government records that still exist support the NASA scientist’s story, even though most were hidden from me and any other writer. It seems that most writer-experts relied on the CIA to tell them the truth, or they relied on people in the USSR to tell them the full story. You may have noticed that books by and about Khrushchev just did not talk about the space program. It seems that the US Congress did not know about the doctor, either. If they did, they would have blabbed about him to everyone they knew. But they thought there was a serious competition and had no idea we were helping the Soviets.

But that was over forty years ago, almost fifty years now. Do you think anybody is willing to release the files on this simple doctor who helped keep Soviet cosmonauts alive? Not in this country. Perhaps one Soviet cosmonaut is still alive who might be interested in telling what he knows.

Anyway, the pain of producing The Insider is almost over. The anticipation of the joy of upsetting self-proclaimed “experts” has kept me to the task. I don’t have any more book ideas now, and this will be my tenth book, so I think I will quit.

Make Way for a Mensch

2010-05-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Often I write about how we are pieces of a movement that enriches the world. It’s the ‘Merican way. If you do your genealogy, you know that. Many Americans have enriched the world through medical research, industrial research and computer research among other ways. What do I mean?

Well, ours is the country large enough and free enough to conduct a medical business that has money left over, a surplus, with which to invent new medicines and machines that will help people get well. Other countries have medical systems that are dominated by government. Their government has taken away all incentives to produce new medicines and machines. They rely on the United States. When the US becomes like them, its incentives will evaporate.

My own background is in industry. I cannot tell you because I do not remember how many of my inventions and methods were used to manufacture devices in a less costly manner so that poor people could afford them. Most of these devices were useful in removing dirt and germs, so people lived better. And they had jobs they could depend on.

Of course, the computer industry revitalized our economy in the 1980’s. Not only did we get a useful product, the computer, but also we got a lot of jobs for people. Wealth was created. We were free enough to evolve an entirely new industry the rest of the world did not have. So we all have benefited .

Who was the guy that invented the computer hard drive? I don’t know. But I know he was a piece of the pattern that produced fast, long-lasting computer machines. And that is about all we can hope for—to be a piece of the pattern. Just as our forefathers and mothers were part of the pattern, adding a nip here and a tuck there in the human quilt, voting for the kind of place they wanted their children to grow up in.

Yesterday, I got word that my brother-in-law died. He had been a professor of some arcane subject in the mechanical engineering school of a large state university. Using his knowledge he developed tomorrow’s inventors. He also came up with some pretty good ideas, himself. But he had another attribute. He was a mensch.

Ordinarily, I do not like to use foreign words when I write. I love the English language (which is about 59% Latin). But we don’t have the word for everything. A mensch, if you don’t know, is Yiddish for

“Someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.”

(I found this definition on an interesting blog: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/how_to_be_a_men.html#ixzz0nNsQo1TS)

It was wonderful to have such a man in the family: quiet, unassuming and brilliant. He wasn’t a mensch because he was a professor. He was a mensch because of his life pattern of conduct. The fact that he was interested in genealogy, the fact that he was a very good pianist and the fact that he was a fine Christian person had nothing to do with his mensch-ness. That was because he chose to live a certain way and he stuck with it.

His name was David Shippy, PhD. He was called professor but his real occupation was to contribute to society and his country in a positive way for as long as he could. In that occupation he was successful. His two children are contributors as well. An attitude like Dave’s is contagious. We’ll probably never know how large his contribution was, but you can bet it was big and red and fit extremely well in the fabric of our social well-being. And it will last for a long time. But you have to stand back to see it. The whole thing has been growing for over two hundred and thirty years.

Digging in the Past

2010-04-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

Writing is not all agony. I write things like this for fun and then send them to a friend, Leland Meitzler, so he can post them on his blog. Besides, they don’t require a lot of research. That work has already been done years ago when I compiled a genealogy. The thing for you readers to remember is that they are all true. Leland’s Blog is very informative and can be found at
http://www.genealogyblog.com/

Don’t Dig Up the Past!

Maybe it is just my family that has problems, but probably not. I just know that I have been warned not to dig up the past by very serious cousins. On more than one occasion and on more than one family line. Of course, reasons were not offered (that would ruin the fun of making the warning).

I have never agreed to stop turning over rocks and looking under them. I just couldn’t agree when I did not know what was hidden there waiting for me to find. In fact, I was spurred on by such warnings.

Of course I found ugly things, especially surrounding the reputations of those who were murdered. That is because it was necessary to blacken the names of those who were about to die. You see, if a murderer went to trial, it was helpful to have killed a bad guy. Juries understand bad guys. Lawyers love to try the victims instead of the perpetr ators. Researchers have to learn to overlook purposeful blackening of names, especially when the victim was involved in a worthy purpose such as interfering with the KKK.

Do you know how the KKK was tracked down in rural areas in 1874? The deputy US Marshall went to retail shops and found out who was selling white sheets. And then he found out who was buying those sheets. Killers who hide under white sheets in the cover of night probably are not good judges of character, and when they are the ones spreading the stories about someone else, you can take those stories with a grain of salt.

When I began researching, I didn’t know who in my family was a good guy and who was not. I just dug until I found the facts. If I found evil people, that is what I reported. If I found good people (or, “just not bad” people), I would report that as well. Mainly, I found what type of enemies an ancestor had. By learning about his enemies, I could get a grasp on my ancestor’s character.

But I will admit that I tend to think the best of someone until I learn differently. After all, saints and sinners abound in this world and have done so for thousands of years. There seem to have been more sinners than saints, making the search for holy folks take a little longer than the search for us ordinary types.
Now that I mention it, I do not recall anyone in my family who could qualify as a saint. There were a few ministers and one who was both a doctor and a minister. He was in St. Charles, MO in 1809-1811 when the biggest quakes in the US hit the Midwest and I don’t know if he uttered one cuss word. That might qualify him for sainthood. I didn’t look at him as a saint, however, but as an entrepreneur. Because he was both a doctor and a preacher, he made money when people were coming and going. Smart man, but not necessarily a saint.

And there was my cousin Jefferson Davis Grover (b. 1861and named for a Southern Saint) who was described by female cousins as the “handsomest man in the world.” He died in 1925 in rather odd circumstances as told by his third wife. He would not be a candidate for sainthood, either, unless you listened to his girlfriends.

There was a cousin, once, whom family members talked about in quiet whispers. It seems her mother was not married to her father, but everyone knew about her birth. Of course, she was properly ostracized. I have tried to locate this cousin who in my mind had no control over what her parents did. I always felt she was treated rather shabbily. She seems to want nothing to with the rest of us for some reason. I can’t say I blame her. To the best of my knowledge she has not taken a shot at any of us. Maybe she is more of a saint than any of us realize.

Digging up the past is fun, as long as no one is hurt by it. To this day, I have no idea why my cousins advised that I not research the family. Maybe they heard something I missed. Most likely they believed something that on the truth scale, ran between zero and one-half. Maybe it made them feel important to be the sharer of family secrets.

No Messages by Me from Beyond the Grave

2010-04-05T14:47:00.000-07:00

I am still writing posts for the blog of my friend Leland Meitzner, the genealogy guru at http://www.genealogyblog.com/. Here is one that is self-explanatory:

Beyond the Grave
Filed in Thomas Fiske articles on Apr.05, 2010

Another amusing article by my friend, Tom Fiske:

I saw an Internet article titled “Texting from Beyond the Grave.” New technology allows a person to embed a chip in his or her granite tombstone that can be excited by telephones in the future so that a dead person’s typed message can be read out. Maybe a photo, too…

And I thought, “Some people just can’t let go.” But I also wondered if I were to leave such a statement, what my last message to the world might be. Would it be something like, “I told Evie I was sick…” or “Love your neighbor,” something that has been done much better and more often in the Bible. I just do not know. I doubt it would be one of those silly items that people send each other on the Internet each day—you know, one of those stories that is simply too cute to pass up, so you have to send the drivel on. Finding the right message would be a tough decision.

One day in 1944 in middle school a teacher had a boy by the name of Gilbert Lutz stand beside him in class. He commended the boy on his ability to carve. It seems the kid had boldly carved his name in a wood toilet seat in the boys’ bathroom. The teacher finished his special address to the carver by saying, “Of course, if that is where you want your name for all the world to see, you certainly have made your mark on the world.” I heard later that his parents were forced to replace the seat. We students wondered if Gilbert was allowed to keep the old seat so he could frame it and hang it on his wall at home.

So these new granite/electronic tombstones carry with them a great responsibility. But we genealogists can forget about them (and unadorned toilet seats, too) because we are already leaving powerful messages behind. Just a short list of a few generations would do, but many of us are also writing about our lives and the lives of our parents and even their parents. Most of these are monumental tales of proud, inner-directed folks.

I recall a Jewish lady who went to Poland in search of her ancestors. She was directed to a German Concentration Camp where her ancestors were put to death. Hers was a poignant story of bravery and destruction that carried with it a reminder of what can happen when we do not watch our political leaders very, very carefully.

My family was not Jewish (that we know of) but it consisted of soldiers in various wars. One was a corporal under Daniel Boone and General George Rogers Clark around 1784. He was not a big-time hero, but his deeds and deeds of those with whom he served, helped form this country. Those were the days when both mom and dad had to be good shots with a long rifle. Some of my people were Indians as well, so I came from a vast collection of shooters and shootees. They had very instructive tales to tell and I am writing them down as well as I am able.

You may choose a different course, but I believe I will forgo the granite messaging service, but will let my genealogy be my testimony, and my message for future generations.

Maybe I can’t let go either.

Hamburgers and Spies

2010-03-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Often, I write posts for another blog. It belongs to the well-known genealogist Leland Meitzler, and its url is http://www.genealogyblog.com/ Here is one of my favorites that I wrote in January.

Cold Case Ancestors and Spies

It’s not that I have given up on Genealogy. It’s just that all the easy stuff has come to light. Now I am down to searching through Bavarian files from the 1800’s and early American files from the 1800’s. Not as much fun as it used to be. And the “oh, ho” remarks are sounding more and more like “oy,vey.” After all, I have been at it since I broke 100% of my legs about 1990. That’s about 20 years.

Yes, I know many of you readers have been at it much longer than twenty years, and I have taken advantage of the Internet during my twenty years. But you know what I mean: the easy data come first and then you run out of easy data unless you hail from a series of large families (another of Fiske’s maxims is that large families produce more genealogists than small families, making research come much more easily).

As I sat back to write this year’s Christmas letter to friends (Evie insists on doing a letter for family members) I gave a thought to bragging points. It wasn’t long before I realized I was at an age when the length of a surgery scar was more important than the length of a holiday trip. But I could talk about my new book, Ploughshares into Swords, which was selling a few copies; I could mention my wild run-in with the CIA having to do with my tenth book; and there were two huge breakthroughs in my genealogy studies.

Nobody much cares about somebody else’s genealogy, though. Unless it involves historical figures. And part of mine was historical, in a way. I had put away my folder on one of the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This “cold case” was Sgt. Nathaniel Hale Pryor, who supposedly had a son, also named Nathaniel, born in Louisville, KY about 1806. (My mother was a Pryor, who was born near Louisville in 1902, so I always had an interest in this family.) Senior was definitely historical and Junior Pryor was instrumental in making sure California went to the United States when Mexico lost its hold, so I think he was also an historical figure.

This is the year (2009) in which I found that Junior was a son of Senior and that both Junior and Senior have descendants who are alive and kicking as this is being written. Some of Junior’s descendants are actually grateful for my work in proving their relation to Senior, but it doesn’t do much good. Actual proof of Senior’s ancestry goes back a generation or two in early Virginia. Then it seems to fade away, although I think I know where it goes after that.

The important thing to me is that those Pryors were Americans-- not original settlers perhaps, but very early, anyway. Weren’t there already English people in Virginia when the Mayflower landed in Plymouth, MA, in 1620? I personally have seen Plymouth Rock and I am no more proud of it than I am those kinder shores in V irginia upstream from where George Washington’s family arrived years later.

Being American is what counts, regardless of the year of entry to our country.

I said there were two big breakthroughs this year. The Pryors were the first. What was the second? Well, my Bavarian great-grandfather Adam had two families. His wife died in the 1860’s in Louisville, leaving him with four small children. One of them died and he farmed out the rest. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that the first set of kids disappeared from all records before 1870. I spent many years looking for those youngsters. Finding all of Adam’s second family had been a chore (and that’s my group), so I closed and put away the folder on his first family several years ago. They became another cold case.

Then, about September, a descendant of a kid in the first family sent me an email. Despite all I could do to discourage him, this young man proved he was indeed my cousin. We shared Adam as an ancestor, but not Adam’s wife. Cheerfully and gratefully, I shared what I knew about Adam. He came from Bavaria, he said, and that is I all I know about the guy. Oh, a good guess is that he lived in the Pfalz area , but that really is all I know.

So I have learned three things in 2009. Two are specific items about my family members and the third is that there are no such things as truly cold cases.

One more thing—when I meet certain people in a restaurant to get background material for my next book, I am taking a camera. I hate being spied on.

Practical Communism

2010-03-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

Who was it that said, “Communism always works when you have enough cement blocks to build walls and guns to shoot people who climb over those walls”?

I noticed that the new US health bill provides for 16,000 additional IRS agents. I wonder how well they shoot?

God help us!

The Fire Is Out

2010-03-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

Maya Angelou, I am told, said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I find her statement to be true. But I am running out of agony. That is, my recent book is about ready for the publisher and I have no desire to write anything else.

Once I wrote a book just for fun. It was about time travel and it was called, Time Out of Joint, a quote from one W. Shakespeare. Nothing was burning a hole in my gut until I finished that story—Maya’s agony was missing. But it came out all right.

The rest of my books, all eight or nine of them, though—they were born of agony. I knew I had to write them or be very uncomfortable the rest of my days. It was family stuff—stories about family members who died for a cause or did something unusual—those true tales pressured me into writing.

This final story is about a friend, a doctor who spent some nine years in the USSR during the space race. Through him (I call him Tad Benson), the US and the USSR shared space medicine information. President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev set up the program. But the USSR could not admit it had help from the US and the US could not admit it had helped the USSR for a variety of reasons. So, even today the story I told is universally denied.

Tad died a few years ago, an unsung hero. All his years of inventing, testing and establishing friendships in two major countries have gone down the drain. But he reached his goal and did not lose an astronaut or cosmonaut during his time of caring for them.

Tad’s story produced agony until it was written. It is called The Insider—NASA’s Man in Baikonur. Baikonur was the name of the secret Soviet rocket launch site.

Now I can rest.

When I give a talk about one of my books, there is always someone in the audience, or maybe two, who say, “I know a story about ____. But I never got around to writing it.”

My response has always been, “When it burns a hole in your gut, you’ll write that story.” That was a long time before I read Maya’s quote. But I knew, I just was certain that the burning of the gut is what drove me and very likely drives many other writers.

When people ask me, “What kinds of reviews did you get for this book?” I tell them the truth. And the truth is that I don’t care. Once the fire is out and the book is complete I can live again. I don’t read the few reviews that I get. It is too late to do anything about them because the book is finished and I am on to another project.

Well, I am through with projects. I refuse to hear about any more of them.

And finally, the fire is out.

Writing for Friends

2009-11-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Lately I have not been writing for my blogs. Instead I have been writing for another blog. It is Leland Meitzler’s Genealogy Blog. There, I am a special category. It is called "Thomas S. Fiske Posts" or some such thing. I asked Leland if I could put some of my Genealogy Posts on my Blog, and he said he didn’t care. So that is what I am going to do . The next few posts on this blog will be posts from Leland’s Genealogy Blog. But they won’t just be abut genealogy, they will be about all kinds of things. I hope you will visit the genealogy blog. It has all kinds of good information on it, not to mention some very good writers.

Here is the URL of the Genealogy Blog: http://www.genealogyblog.com/

Intel Agencies--Another First

2009-11-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

Every kid goes through a lot of first-time experiences. You know, first long pants like my older brothers had, first adult-size pillow, first bicycle, first BB gun and many other firsts a kid has to fight for and can almost taste before he gets them.

At the outer fringes of my youth and well over sixty years of age, I am still a kid a heart. So I really was interested in my first Spook event. No, it’s too late for Halloween, I mean another kind of spook, entirely.

You see, I was at a hamburger place recently. I agreed to meet with a fellow radio Ham and a man who said he had once been with the CIA. I wanted background material for my next book, which is highly complimentary of the CIA and US Intel agencies. I had asked the CIA and others for help with the project, so I know they know what I am doing. I have no secrets. A little advertising is always a lot of help.

So I got to the restaurant and waited for the other two men to show up. The Ham came first. Having worked in the electronics industry, George is a few years older than I and has many more years of electronic experience. I don’t know what he worked on. He isn’t allowed to tell me and he doesn’t. Maybe he didn’t even work on electronics.

We started with a pair of lemonades while we waited for Jack, the third guy. George and I sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant where we hear but could not be overheard. He chose the booth. We talked for a few minutes and I made notes. It was subtle, but I noticed that George changed topics and began to tell me about things he had mentioned before. Soon he was telling innocuous stories about physics. It was hard for me to follow. Something was plainly wrong. I thought it was because Jack had not showed up and he was stalling for time.

Eventually Jack arrived and sat down. He was very vague as well. He went to get himself a lemonade. I noticed a man sitting in a booth facing ours. He was reading a girly novel and holding the book in a peculiar fashion. I thought little about him.

When Jack returned he suggested moving to another booth. There, he sat against the wall where he could see out across the room. He and George made remarks to each other that I did not understand. I told them, “You guys are like twins who have your own private language. I wish I knew what was going on.” At that moment, the reader stood and called for a waitress. He told her there was a package under the table where we had been sitting. She came over and got it to put in their “lost and found” drawer. It belonged to Bill, so he asked her for it.

George and Jack laughed. Jack said “I’ll tell you in a minute.” He waited until the book reader left. Then Jack said, “We’re being watched. George and I are used to it. There were two men in here keeping an eye on us. One just left. He could have just given that package to us, but he didn’t want us to look at him. We can go ahead and talk now.”

Of course I asked about the two men. I felt dumb because I wasn’t aware of all that was going on around me. (I usually am aware of my surroundings, but I was focused on getting answers to questions about Spookisms I had generated while writing.)

We talked for quite a while. Another man came in, a radio Ham whom George and I knew, but Jack did not. We made introductions. And then George began chatting with the new guy. Jack said out of the corner of his mouth, “George is keeping him busy so we can talk, so go ahead.” It was such a smooth transition that neither the new guy nor I had noticed it. Once again, I was angry with myself because I missed the maneuvering.

Nevertheless, I learned new things to put in my book, which is nearing its last chapter. When the interview was about over, I gave Jack a copy of my last book and wrote a dedication in the cover to him. George wanted him to read it. He thought it might have enough interesting material in it for a documentary film. Jack produces films on the side.

Jack thanked me for the book. He was interested in my unfinished book, he said, for its documentary value. He didn’t know about Ploughshares, my current book about Caltech and its secret operations during WWII.

I looked around for more watchers, didn’t see any, and left the restaurant, happy that I may have obtained enough material to complete my next book.

I couldn’t help but wonder at whom the spooks were really directing their attention and how they knew we would be at that restaurant at that time, and so on.

It was later that I realized I had experienced another “first.” It was the first time I had been “spooked.” Getting a new bike is more fun.

DNA Curve

2009-06-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

(This is an edited post of May 31, as corrected by Kent Pryor, to whom I am very grateful.)
I just call it the Fiske curve because I don’t have any other name for it. Others may have found it and named it something else. In any case the curve sets out principles worth remembering about DNA findings in Genealogy. I got the data from conversations of several people on the Internet this week.

Several people on a Rootsweb List were discussing their strange findings from DNA tests and seemed to be laying down information we could all use.
One person wrote, “the 12 marker test is of almost no value, as many unrelated individuals can match at the 12 marker level.” I suspect that many people on many Lists are finding the same result, once they have obtained information from the 12 marker studies and then, encouraged, have gone on to the next step or two. This particular subject went on to the 67 marker test and found no one related who should be related, and then found four with the same DNA on all 67 markers who were not related at all. It is information like this that led me to think about some kind of a curve that would fit these data. Admittedly the evidence is anecdotal, but the facts real and have to be dealt with.

Another person wrote, “I have 180 names on my 12 marker (tests) on Ydna on my mother’s side all different names. I have the same thing you have on the 25 and 37 marker names that are unrelated and three different ones. . . I thought DNA had gone Crazy.”

With Ydna, you are following men’s DNA which would involve few name changes. But why is it that the more markers one uses, the less useful has become the data? Why is it that more detail seems to lead to more uncertainty? That is, adding markers tends to exclude relatives. This is counter-intuitive.

It appears that the curve is saying that if you have 0 marker tests that you could be related to everybody. If you have the minimum number of markers tested, you could be related to not all, but many people. And if you have many markers tested you are related to very few people, even in your own family.
This could mean several things:

1) DNA tests are not testing what we think they are testing.
Very simply put, DNA testing may not be valid in a scientific sense. It would be interesting to combine results of thousands of tests to see how much uncertainty is introduced to established, documented lines. Perhaps DNA tests are reflecting epigenetics, a condition that is not yet proven, but which is considered possible by some experts.

2) Family names and records are not a good indicator of genuine relationships.
This is the opposite of 1 (above). Essentially, it says there is little true paternity in family lines.

3) DNA closeness can be more due to ancient cultural habits than anything else.
Before the industrial revolution, there seem to have been few travelers. That is, one seldom traveled more than seven or more miles from his home in a lifetime. The result had to be inter-marriage of cousins, and DNA tests today are simply reflecting those intermarriages. However, in America, where Swedish immigrants married Italian immigrants, the gene pool swelled and would have made an abrupt change from, say, 1800 on. This change should be apparent in some DNA studies. (I am a six foot tall, blond and blue-eyed American who is in small part American Indian).
Maybe all the above is a result of poor labeling. But I think it is telling us something that we didn’t especially want to know. And that is that our precious DNA marker tests are not doing what we wanted.

Maybe O. J. didn't kill his wife, after all.

Khrushchev Lied and an American Spied

2009-05-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

As I was writing yesterday’s post to this blog, I wondered who would be upset when my book, The Insider comes out. This is the actual story of NASA’s man who spent nine years flying into and out of the USSR during the Space Race and the Cold War. He was a space medicine scientist who was successful at keeping Soviet cosmonauts alive. He was a physician, a scientist, an inventor, and a serious man. That is why I believed my friend Tad when he told me about his adventures.

Seriousness aside, I checked his story. He had told me that on his return trips he had to be debriefed by two US Intel agencies. I found that he was attached to the NSA and the CIA for those nine years, according to their own records. The Department of State had absolutely no information on Tad except for one small document it had forgotten to purge. NASA had piles of information on Tad about his medical work in micro-gravity conditions, but it had no information about his travels to the USSR.

Tad had been a guest of the USSR at the invitation of Premier Krushchev. I wrote to authors of various books and articles about the Space Race and about “inside” information on the NSA and CIA, and I also wrote to one descendant of Premier Krushchev who knew a great deal about the USSR in those days. To date no one has told me that I am nuts. Most have said, “I didn’t know. Give me more details.” A copy of a letter from the NSA usually convinced them.

So now, as I finish my book on Tad, I wonder about the people I am going to offend. At least two countries are involved, of course: the US and Russia. Let’s look at Russia first.

Apparently, the Russian people know almost nothing about any assistance from the West. It appears from what I have read that the Russian people do not know about America’s Lend Lease program of the early 1940’s. In that program America supplied the Russians with aircraft, guns, ammunition, food and other supplies with which to fight the Germans. The Russian people do not know they were assisted in “The Great Patriotic War,” even sixty or more years afterward. The Russian people were not told the name of their space program manager until about 1985, when he died. His face was never shown on any Soviet TV, his name was never mentioned. Certainly, the Russian people do not know they were assisted in their space program by their chief competitor, the United States. Once the Russian people find out we helped them, they might be angry at their own leaders.

What about America’s allies? They might be offended when they find out we helped the USSR and didn’t tell them. More than that—we lied to our allies about what we knew. I doubt that we have come clean because no one seems to know about Tad. Of course authors of books and magazines and news articles in other countries will feel duped.

And in America, itself, there may be problems. President John F. Kennedy began this program a few months before he was killed. President Johnson and President Nixon continued the program and did not tell Congress. Those presidents lied to the US press and to the Congress in order to keep funds flowing for the space program. It may not have been a space race after all. Congress consists of the biggest bunch of blabbermouths in the US. If Congress people had known about Tad the world would have known about Tad, right after the Congress people were sworn to secrecy. There is no reason to think that NASA ever knew that Tad, formerly one of their own, had been in the USSR.

Several, if not all US Intel agencies knew about Tad. People in those agencies are all retired now and many have died. Newer members of the agencies don’t care about something that happened forty years ago. They have enough trouble with today’s problems.

Well, US Intel agencies might care to this extent: Tad’s trips to the USSR during the Cold War era were an intelligence coup. When my story is printed and people realize what the Intel people have done while claiming they didn’t even know where the Soviet secret launch was, they should have more confidence in these shadowy agencies.

Of course, there are American authors and former Soviet people in this country who write articles and books—they are sure to be embarrassed when the truth comes out. They have already commented on President Kennedy’s offer to share information on space medicine and have said that the offer was refused. Too bad for them.

But the people who really care the most about this story probably are those who make up the US president’s office. I suspect (but do not know) that President Kennedy promised Premier Khrushchev that the US Government would never tell the Soviet people that we helped them in the Space Race. There is, according to the CIA, a file on TAD that has a presidential seal on it. That means the file is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act laws.

Also, it may be that the US President does not want the US Congress to know that a previous president failed to report to Congress that we had a man in the USSR during the Space Race.

I sure would like to see that file. I have written to two presidents and asked to have a look. I even asked my congressman to ask the President. The President has not honored my request.

When Tad told me his story, he was dying. He has been gone for almost seven years. To my way of thinking he was a great American hero, a brave man who ventured into the Soviet Union without protection. He did it not once but many times during the Cold War, even when there was a sudden change in Soviet leadership in 1964 and he did not know whether he would be arrested. But by then he had many friends among the Soviet scientists and cosmonauts, and maybe they had enough pressure to protect him. We will never be certain about that, only that Tad went when he was called.

Beating Ploughshares into Swords

2009-05-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

It’s over. My ninth book, is on the market and I can turn to more important things, such as my tenth book. And Ham radio. And maybe, politics.

My ninth book, Ploughshares into Swords, is about WWII—how civilians and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) helped win the war. A friend of mine was also a friend of several Caltech physicists during and after the war. She supplied part of the information I used. One of her special friends was physicist Carl Anderson, who discovered anti-matter.

My friend and I were talking about scientific achievements that she knew about almost first hand. She observed that I understood what had been accomplished and that perhaps I could have kept up with these Nobel scientists had I been in their fields. I knew this wasn’t true, but I certainly wasn’t going to say so. Anyway, as I was writing about the physicists and discovered what they did as kids, I realized I had done many of the same things. But I also had become a licensed Amateur Radio (Ham) operator at an early age.

So as I wrote, I thought about being a Ham again and wondered if it were too late. I had not been licensed since 1954. In January of 2008 I took all the tests and passed them. Now Ham radio is cutting into my writing time.

Writing Ploughshares was work, but it was also fun, remembering the past and the hardships and comparing people’s attitudes then with attitudes today. I concluded that we are among a lot of dainty whiners in America.

Choosing the title from the Bible, where it talked about beating swords into ploughshares because it was a time for peace, I found of course WWII was a time for doing the opposite—taking scrap metal and forging it into guns, tanks and ammunition.

Writing Ploughshares was a trail of discovery as I learned new things about the atomic bomb, about the way that Caltech became a rocket factory and how Caltech built the China lake facility. No, I am not talking about Jet Propulsion Laboratory, either. I am talking about dry powder rockets fired from airplanes. There was enough fuel for those rockets stored around the area to blow Pasadena, CA off the map.

It is not my practice to write about the commonplace. I have no capacity or patience for it. So I wrote about secret or little-known facts that only friends of physicists at the time could know. In the process, I came to admire Caltech and its growth from rags to riches. I came to admire the practical physicists and administrators who shared a common vision and caused that growth. Now Caltech is synonymous with rocket science, cosmology and many other exotic fields. In a way I saw it happen.

While writing about world politics leading up to WWII, I had the opportunity to revisit the foreign and domestic policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. As writer with a background in economics, I found myself critiquing the seven lean years of the Roosevelt administration when he compounded the economic misery of the United States. In these days, I am seeing a new edition of the Roosevelt plan unfolding, so when I get back to writing on this web site I am very likely to comment on repeating mistakes of the past. But right now, I have to sell a few books and finish my tenth book.

“What is my tenth book about?” you ask. Well, during the Space Race with the USSR, the US had a space medicine scientist in Russia at its secret Baikonur launch site, courtesy of Premier Khrushchev (& Brezhnev). It is a deep, dark secret in both countries, but with reluctant help from NSA, CIA, NASA, and the Department of State, I am slowly putting the story together. Many “experts” have written that this did not happen, so my tenth book will be controversial. But I knew the NASA scientist who spent almost ten years going back and forth from the US to the USSR, making friends with Soviet cosmonauts and Soviet scientists, and helping them stay alive in micro-gravity conditions.

There is a great deal to write about, and the Agony of Writing continues despite adventures in a very vibrant hobby called Ham Radio.

The book? Oh, it is paperback, about 6X9 inches with around 324 pages and an index. It is for sale by Amazon and most dot com book stores. I can be Googled and so can my book.

Sincerely,

Tom, AA6TF

Barack's Chickens Coming Home to Roost

2008-11-02T04:38:00.000-08:00

In my forthcoming book, Ploughshares into Swords, I tell how a Colonel in the US Army visited Belgium at the end of WWII. At an inn an old Belgian man wanted permission to kiss the colonel because the American Army had save Belgium not once but twice from the German horde. “American chickens had come home to roost.”

Before it was all over and the Cold War was over, Belgium had been saved from the Soviets. American chickens had indeed “come home to roost,” as far as Belgians were concerned. We saved the Belgians three times.

It is an old homeletical trick to move from the particular to the general. That is, an invasion of Iraq suddenly becomes symbolic of all American actions. A girl baby sitter shakes a baby to death and “American Women are Killing our Youngsters.” This is the gimmick employed by the Right Reverend Jeremiah Wright (RJW) at his Chicago church. For twenty years Barack Obama never heard this hateful message. RJW preached hatred and did it ignorantly. Yet Barack said Wright was the best the black church had to offer. Many black ministers would disagree.

According the RJW, Iraq, an action Wright did not agree with, became symbolic for all America’s actions. Obama somehow did not get the connection. Or he lied about it.

A minister I knew once preached that the American dollar was declining and that was God’s curse on America. I caught him after the sermon and respectfully said, “Frank, it is good for the American dollar to lose its value, because that makes our goods cheaper allowing more Americans go to work.” He was suddenly aware that he had misspoken. His face turned red but he never corrected his statement. He was too much in love with his own argument.

Did America save Europe three times? Of course. Is Japan better off than it was in the 1940’s? Yes, the people are richer and they seem to have grown five inches in stature as well (according to military records).

Barack Obama is dense or dishonest. His defenders will say, in effect, “Everybody does it.” And the matter will be settled. Few defend RJW, though. He appears to be a hating, “America last” minister, preaching to the worst in people. Not the worst of people, but the worst in people, who are easily led. One can easily extend Wright’s thinking to citizens who are going to vote to support a man, Wright’s nominee.

Franklin and Barack

2008-10-31T04:05:00.000-07:00

There are a few accurate historians who noticed that Franklin D. Roosevelt brought with him the seeds of the Nation’s economic destruction in 1932. That is, businessmen and investors distrusted him, and rightly so. He had decidedly socialist leanings in a time of world socialism. Thus, his policies continued the breadth and depth of the Great Depression. This is because capital investment is a huge factor in an economy. Since people who could be investors, weren’t investing. The economy suffered.

The Englishman Lord Keynes, on whom FDR depended for economics advice, recognized the need for investment and told FDR that since the private sector would not invest, the Federal Government should do the investing. It was an admission that people with capital did not trust the new president.

Once again we are faced with electing a man with decidedly socialistic tendencies—Barack Obama. He is a lawyer and seems not overly astute at economic matters. He is probably not a historian, so we may well be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the 1930’s. That is, people with capital will not invest and the Federal Government will invest in their places. A bloated, unmanageable Government will become even more so.

Am I wrong about this? Perhaps. But I noticed that recently, when the polls showed a decreasing gap between the popularity of the two presidential candidates, the stock market rose almost 900 points.

Probably, private investors are a little better at history and at economics than Mr. Obama.

No Financial Bailout

2008-09-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

Today the House failed to get behind a proposed rescue bill for the financial industry. Some call it a bail-out. Banks have failed. They probably would have failed anyway. At any rate I am hearing that the American people do not want the House Bill. A significant number of Democrats and Republicans would not vote for the Bill. There is probably little disagreement over the inept handling by the Speaker of the House.

What is plan B? Well, the problem seems to be not that the financial markets need seven hundred billion dollars. The problem seems to be uncertainty, or risk. Therefore, if the government can alleviate the risk, the financial markets can rest easy and the proposed disaster can be avoided.

But perhaps that is not what the House majority wants. After all, they proposed a bill and immediately larded it with billions in earmarks. If they were serious, they would have proposed a clean bill with no money in it for Acorn, the suspect political organizers.

But back to risk, which is the underlying problem. If the government were to offer a bill that would alleviate risk, the problem would suddenly become manageable. How to do this? Several people have already proposed such a bill: offer to insure or back the bad mortgages. Some mortgages would have to be declared dead, but many other would not and in any case the financial markets could continue to operate.

Yes, the government might come out ahead with its insurance program as it did with other large programs of offering to backup the finances of a company or a country. It is an idea that the American people might find less offensive.

But, it is a political year in which one party or the other must be seen to save the day, and screw the American people. Those who voted against the House bill today may well turn out to be heroes.

Did you happen to think that today’s bailout bill might have been tossed out by the Supreme Court? After all, it puts too much power in the hands of an unelected official. There is nothing Constitutional about that bill.

PACs Upon US

2008-08-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

Having just returned from the gas pump where I paid about $4.00 per gallon for gasoline, I began to think about the various PACs, Political Action Committees that are responsible for such high prices. I thought of three PACS right away:

Pompous Asses in Congress who will not let us drill for our own oil.

Previous Administration Clods who said, “Why drill in Alaska? It will take ten years to see any result, anyway.” Those ten years and more have arrived.

Preventers of Atomic Construction. We need to be like the French in one way: we need to generate our electricity with Atomic Energy.

We may be sure that there are Arab interests who, with their own PACs financed by our dollars, are actively working against any members of Congress who want the US to drill for its own oil.

Arabian PACs and the ones mentioned above are working against Paying American Citizens.

Easy for Some . . .

2008-07-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting writers I have read recently, writes about murders in history with a keen insight and great sense of humor. Immediately, I was jealous of Keven McQueen (www.kevenmcqueen.com), who teaches English at a Kentucky university. His students are just plain lucky.

It was my brother who told me one of Keven’s books included a tale about our great-grandfather, the man who helped Confederate General John Hunt Morgan escape from Yankees in 1863. I did not know the story Keven told. It was news to me. But I never claimed to know all there was to know about my great-grandfather Pryor.

Keven was hard to find on the Internet, but once I had turned up enough rocks around his university, I stumbled across an email address for him-- no doubt just for his students. So I wrote to Keven and asked if he had written about any of the murders I had written about. He soon responded. The answer was in the negative, so I had no reason to be jealous of him were not for the fact that Keven was a better writer. than I.

I took out my irritable feelings toward Keven by saying that he was very hard to locate and that he needed a web site. I even offered to get more information so he could set up a site. He responded by saying that he had a friend who would put one together for him. And, by golly, he did!

So Keven has a nice web site and it has more personality than mine. Another strike against him.

The angst of writing not only includes the agony of punching keys on a computer while deciding whether you are using the correct verbal form of, say, preach. In the past tense is it “prought”? Maybe not. The angst of writing also involves reading other writers who say the same things you do, but they do it better.

Some writers such as Keven write easily, while others pound out each word with great difficulty. I used to say, and may have said it here, that the author Wendell Berry’s words are like feathers on a page while mine are like nails driven into an oak board—and bent over. On a scale that extends between Heaven and Hell, Keven is closer to Wendell than to me as a wordsmith. But I enjoy the warmer temperatures.

General Who?

2007-12-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

If I asked most people who General John Hunt Morgan was, they would say, “General who?”

But there are a few others who would say, “What have you found out about him?”

I found out quite a bit about the General, during the period when he escaped from an Ohio Union prison in 1863 and fled to Kentucky with his assistant, Captain Thomas Hines. They were searching for my great-grandfather Pryor. They figured he would help the pair get back into the fighting between the Confederate Army and the Union Army.

And they were right. Pryor managed to get them through Union Army lines and back to the South. But Pryor had to flee to Canada, where he waited out the Civil War.

I always wanted to know why my great-grandfather went to Canada. With the help of family papers, papers from the family of the author/poet Wendell Berry (his great-grandfather Pollard worked with Pryor to help Morgan escape) and memoirs of Thomas Hines about written 1893, I managed to put the full story together. It is in a book due to come out soon called General Morgan’s Legacy—a Modern Civil War Story.

I called the book by that title because Pryor and Hines owed partially their political and judicial careers to their part in the escape of Morgan. It is a novel about a modern industrialist who dug into his past and found the story. His story is a novel, but Morgan’s story is about as true as I could make it.

I believe I have added new information to the existing body of Civil War lore.

John+Hunt+Morgan William+S.+Pryor Civil+War Confederacy

Jenna Six Debacle

2007-12-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

I was watching a baseball game on TV recently when I saw a wonderful sight. People streamed into the stands and sat down to watch. They were people of all kinds and nobody cared who sat where as long as he or she had the correct ticket number. They watched the game and ate their hot dogs and went home in peace.

Remarkable!

Such a sight would mean nothing to young people, but to those of us who have been around a few years, it is little more than a miracle. Many of us dreamed that it could someday happen, but we didn’t know it could come to pass with out deadly struggles.

Thanks to cool heads, people of all races can go and do what they want and nobody cares! I saw it in my lifetime and I am grateful to have seen it.

And then there was the ugly scene in a town called Jena, where some ass decided a tree would look good if it had nooses on it. Then kids of one race ganged up on a kid from another race and a minor war began.

I have been a teacher in public schools and I have looked out at a classroom of faces of Palestinian kids, Caucasian kids, Chinese kids, Black kids and Hispanic kids and thought to myself, “this is where tolerance begins.”

There are two places where race has no meaning. One is in church and the other is in school (a kind of secular church). A teacher teaches all who enter the room. He or she doesn’t have the time or inclination to favor one group or the other.

One time I taught in a middle school. And it had a tree on the campus that provided a very pleasant shade on sunny days. It was also the site of segregation. Yep! Only eighth graders were allowed to sit under that tree. They were the seniors of the school, and it was their privilege, their earned right, to relax under its branches during lunch.

Teachers in that school were mostly white but there were some black and Asian teachers also, and perhaps a Hispanic teacher from time to time. The majority of students were Asian. There was no hint of racial intolerance at the school. The subject didn’t come up because it didn’t have to. It was unthinkable. Parents and teachers just did not contemplate any differences based on the color of someone’s skin.

And then there is the Jena school blow-up. How could such a thing happen in the year 2007? I do not live there and cannot speculate, except to think that perhaps the teachers decided that the “modern” thing to do was let the inmates run the asylum.

Yes, modernity happens. In 1972 when my son was in a large high school, the principal was trying to find a room where students could smoke cigarettes because, “they were going to do it, anyway.” Now, most campuses are “smoke free” and even teachers do not smoke on them.

I like what the radio host Dennis Prager once said: “There are only two races—the decent and the indecent.” He is a wise man.

Jena+Six Dennis+Prager education

Our Man in the Baikonur Cosmodrome

2007-11-10T14:04:00.000-08:00

Almost no one knows today that during the space race with the USSR during Cold War conditions was not much of a race, after all. NASA had a man stationed in the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome from about 1963 through 1971.

NASA’s man was a space medicine scientist whom Premier Khrushchev allowed to enter the USSR to consult with his Soviet counterparts. He was a very good scientist who was aware of much that went on around him. And he made strong friends with several Soviet scientists and cosmonauts. Colonel Yuriy Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut, was one of the American scientist’s friends.

The American NASA scientist made frequent trips to the USSR for at least eight years. In October of 1964 when Khruschev was deposed the American scientist kept going back to the USSR, not really sure that the next Premier, Brezhnev, was going to be as friendly as Khrushchev had been. NASA’s man was a hero.

Now, fifty years after Sputnik, and a great deal of cooperation with the USSR, the American scientist’s brave efforts are still being kept quiet. I wrote to Sergei Khrushchev, son of Premier Khrushchev, and asked him if anyone in Russia today would care if they found out about the US-USSR cooperation in space medicine. Mr. Khruschev was very courteous but his response was not reassuring.

So for a while, NASA’s American Scientist in the USSR will have to remain anonymous.

Nikita+Khrushchev NASA Sputnik Brezhnev Cold+War space+race Yuri+Gagarin Baikonur+Cosmodrome

Fears that Never Go Away

2007-11-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

It was in the 1959-1960 period that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was running for president. He was handsome, charming, humorous, and well-spoken. Yet, some folks were deeply concerned about JFK. What was their concern? Well, he has a Catholic, and a Catholic had never been in the Oval Office before. Didn’t it stand to reason that the Pope was going to move into the White House and run the United States of America?

Now Mitt Romney is running for president. He is handsome, charming, humorous and well-spoken. But he is a Mormon. If Romney wins the election, it stands to reason that the Mormons about to take over the White House and the country. Or does it?

What people didn’t seem to know about John Fitzgerald Kennedy was that his religion was politics. It appears that Mitt Romney’s religion is politics, too.

Therefore, if Romney wins the election, a politician will be in the White House. Nothing will change very much and life will go on.

Mitt+Romney John+F.+Kennedy

Michael Vick and His Dogs

2007-08-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

Long in the minority, I am a white guy who likes Michael Vick and hates what happened to him. What he did was unkind to dumb animals. I want animals treated better than that.

The real problem is that Michael should have kept up with social mores. They changed years ago to the point where staging dog fights is no longer acceptable. In his area of the country, dog fighting probably had no change in standards. So Michael Vick continued to promote them and got caught. It just shows the value of keeping up with changing standards. “Everybody does it” is an excuse that only politicians can use successfully.

If Michael were in Vermont and had raped a girl, he might have gotten only 90 days in the slammer. But he treated dogs badly and will probably get a year. Afterwards he may be facing a career of football in Canada or Germany at much lower hourly rates that he is used to getting.

You gotta watch those mores.

football Michael Vick Vermont Social Mores

Alberto Gonzales Bites the Political Dust

2007-08-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

In an amazing “mine is bigger than yours” battle, the Bush administration lost its Justice Department’s leader, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He seemed like a decent man if a bit confused. I would prefer him to Janet Reno. But he had two problems.

One of Alberto’s problems was that he was Hispanic. Hispanics in prominent positions must be Liberals or they must disappear. Conservative Hispanics must not be seen as successful. If Liberal Hispanics saw successful Hispanics who owed nothing to the “minority establishment,” they might begin to question the “minority establishment.”

The second of Alberto’s problems is that he seems naïve. He seems to think that if he treats people fairly, they will treat him fairly. Harry Truman said something like, “In Washington, if you want a friend, get a dog.”

Thirdly and least important, Alberto seems confused and unable to stand up to the windbags in the Senate. Normally, confusion is no hindrance to keeping a high level position in Government. Nor is incompetence. But when combined with situations one and two (above), one can easily lose his job.

politics Alberto Gonzales Attorney General Janet Reno Liberals Conservatives Senate

Loyalty or Daintiness in Time of War?

2007-08-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

At the time of our Revolutionary War, historians say, there was a sizeable segment of the American population that was loyal to King George, III. That is, they did not want to separate themselves from England, and didn’t care that England was dealing harshly with its American colonies. Liberty was not for them.

No doubt some folks were loyal to the Crown. But if today is any index, many of the “loyalists” were just too dainty for war. Liberty was not all that important—certainly not worth dying for. Of course, they found that they had chosen the wrong side and faced hanging or imprisonment under the new American government.

My wife’s ancestors were in that group who were on the losing side. They were given land in Ontario, Canada that was due west of Rhode Island, their former home. I prefer to think they were loyalists and not faint-hearted. Over the next 100 years they worked themselves down the north side of Lake Ontario and crossed over the US boundary near Chicago (best guess) and wound up in Iowa, no doubt semi-illegal aliens. Others stayed in Ontario and are Canadians to this day. They are still subjects of the Crown.

The moral of the story is that one should choose the right side before refusing to fight for one’s liberty. The wrong side will not take their decision lightly.

Revolutionary+War King+George+III American+History

Congress at 2.9% Favorable?

2007-08-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

Is it true that the latest Zogby poll shows the Congress has a 2.9% approval rating on the Iraq War? With a + or – 1.1 % margin of error that suggest a broad number of respondents, the actual approval rating on Congress could be 1.8% favorable on Iraq. Too bad that Zogby is a Democrat pollster.

To my way of thinking Congress polled a bit high on this poll. Not many Americans are ready to surrender to the fanatical Arabs, yet. But a lot of Congressmen and women are ready to throw in the towel (or begin wearing one on their heads).

No wonder Will Rogers said something like, “It’s easy being a comedian when the entire U. S. Congress is supplying material for you.”

Congress Iraq+War Radical+Muslims Zogby Politics

Secret Scientist

2007-07-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

What’s amazing to me is that even today no one knows. NASA actually had a scientist in and out of Russia from 1962 to 1971 during the space race and the Cold War. Yes, Mr. Krushchev actually allowed a space medical scientist from the US to help keep alive the Russian cosmonauts.

My research on the subject showed that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Krushchev softened his stand against America. But I had no idea that he was so soft he would allow an American scientist to observe the take-offs and landings of Yuriy Gagarin.

Yet, the scientist and Yuriy were pals. In fact most people on the Russian space team from Chief Manager Korolev to the first woman cosmonaut, knew this man and liked him.

He was a big friendly Irishman, but he was also a consummate professional and what he said, you could make book on. Not long after the scientist’s first trip to Baikonur, the secret launch site (that wasn’t a secret after all), a US government memo went to NASA, saying in effect, “I want you to make plans to cooperate with the USSR on outer space projects.” It seems like the result of personal diplomacy to me, from the scientist who was fast becoming a fixture in Russia.

Does the CIA have a thick file on the scientist? They sure do but will not give it up. So does another intelligence agency. So does NASA, of course.

Why is it such a big secret about our space medicine scientist who helped the Russians? I don’t know. But it does appear that those clever Russian engineers who beat us in the early stages of the space race were weak in knowledge about keeping their cosmonauts alive. Maybe the bosses in Russia just do not want to let the Russian people know that they needed help. Maybe there was a quid pro quo I haven’t found yet.

But one thing I do know is that the scientist was a good friend. Also he was an American hero for taking the chances he did by flying secretly into the far reaches behind the Iron Curtain. I am writing about him now and hope to have a book about him finished this year.

I only wish I could use his name.

Korolev Space+Race Cold+War Yuriy+Gagarin CIA NASA Krushchev Baikonur

Politics and Religion

2007-07-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

It is only human. Whenever a religious person gets mixed up in politics, his religion goes out the window. He soon warps his religious ideas so that they support his politics. It never seems to work the other way, that a man’s politics change to accommodate his religion. I can imagine that is why our Constitution separates one from the other—so that there is no state supported religion.

It is a bad combination, politics and religion. When I taught school and the subject was pertinent, I always told the kids that when they grew up to vote or to run cities, states or even the country (we had that quality of kids), they must keep their religious leaders from being their political leaders. “Or else,” I told them, “you will have politicians who would try to convince them that if they would give up their lives for one political cause or another, they would win a place in heaven.” I told them that political leaders are usually the last to know about heaven.

Don’t tell me it can’t happen. It happens all the time. What about Japanese Kamikaze pilots in WWII and Suicide Murderers (bombers) in the Middle East? And then there is always Jim Jones and his Kool Aid fan club.

Politics Religion Kamikaze Suicide+Bombers Kool+Aid

Great Time to Be Alive

2007-07-09T21:39:00.000-07:00

A friend called me today and asked if I wanted to go for a cup of coffee. I did, because I have been researching the Soviet space program all day for the Cold War period. It is background for a book I am writing.

Always unpredictable, I had an iced tea instead of coffee. While we were consuming our beverages, we got to talking about modern technology. I recalled the rapid changes we humans have been going through.

In our ancient human history, mankind was said to have doubled its knowledge every thousand years. That knowledge was stored in people’s heads, for the most part. Some was on the walls of caves. Then books were invented and mankind’s knowledge doubled every hundred years. That knowledge, good and bad, was stored in libraries. The computer was invented and soon mankind’s knowledge doubled every ten years. That knowledge was stored in libraries and on tapes and CDs. Next, the Internet was created and mankind’s knowledge is said to double every year. That knowledge is stored on CDs, DVDs and on hard drives all over the world. No libraries or collection of libraries could hold it all, if it were written in books.

Then we talked about the future. I think that the really big events of the future will concern themselves with health and energy. I wrote about these things in book about time travel called Time Out of Joint. In it I emphasized the role of energy. I have the notion that when energy is more equally distributed, international tensions will ease. No, religious differences will still be important. But many “religious” differences are spurred on by economics, the battle between the haves and the have nots.

Whatever the case, some ass will first have to write a book about how awful everything is—stagflation and the disappearance of the quality of life as we know it. Several books of this type were published around 1970, just as the computer age appeared. I am waiting for the next such book, because the timing of the doom-sayers is almost universally 180 degrees out of phase.

And I will have an iced tea in the writer’s honor because something good is about to happen.

future Space+Race Energy health computer+age knowledge Knowledge+storage time+travel

Jefferson and Adams Day

2007-07-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Sacred to both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, July 4th is also special to many Americans. Both former presidents stretched out their lives so that they would die on this day in 1826. When Jefferson woke for the last time in 1826, he asked if it were the fourth yet. When told that it was, he allowed himself to die. Former presidents Jefferson and Adams had faith in men’s ability to rule themselves and knew of the importance of the date.

Alexander Hamilton did not have the confidence in man’s ability to rule his own life. While still a great man and an important contributor to the founding of this country, Hamilton looked toward Europe and a king to rule America.

Even today we have a few Hamiltons in government who look toward Europe’s form of government and whatever else of Europe they can adopt in order to “reform” Americans and put us on the right track. They are the elites who have little faith in our ability to rule ourselves.

Does anyone remember a day sacred to Alexander Hamilton?

Independence+Day Thomas+Jefferson Alexander+Hamilton John+Adams Politics freedom liberty

Death of a Senate Bill and the Ruling Class

2007-06-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

Now that the Illegal Emigration bill has died a second natural death, a second post mortem would be in order.

First, it should be noted that the American People did not want the bill to be passed. They spoke in new ways, through emails and other electronic devices and made their wishes known. The ruling class heard the American People and enough of that class decided not to risk the inevitable result of defying the People. But, some of the ruling class still thinks, in its elitist way, that it knows what is best for us. They may flunk out of the ruling class, soon.

Second, it should be observed that American Unions did not want the bill to be passed. Thus, there were Democrat leaders who worked for the bill as they worked against it. This way they could be seen as pro-illegal emigrant and anti-cheap labor at the same time. Union bosses speak loudly.

Third, those of us who are against the bill will be called all sorts of names. We will be reviled as many kinds of –phobes. Tough! It is hard to get into a struggle without being called names. That is the way of Washington, DC. They will say that radio talk shows were responsible for the failure of the bill. Nevertheless, it was the People who made the decision based on the information they had. It has been a long time since we have had two sides presented on any issue. It was a refreshing experience.

Fourth, Washington Insiders are already saying that we can’t control the problem because the new law wasn’t passed. But we have plenty immigration laws on the books right now that we are not enforcing. Why not try them? It would be a novel adventure. After all, we were told some 21 years ago by Senator Teddy Kennedy what a good law the last one was. Let us try it out and see if it needs improving. So far no one has tried it.

What really bothers the Ruling Class is that the People may decide to stop some other legislation, such as raises for the inept in their class. I, for one, can hardly wait.

Senate Immigration Talk+Radio Teddy+Kennedy

Illegal Immigration & the Next Prez

2007-06-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

What concerns me about the proposed Illegal Alien situation has nothing to do with President Bush. He is totally unimportant in the entire equation, because he will not be president for very long. What he says or does cannot tie the hands of another president. If Mr. Bush’s successor chooses not to enforce part or all of the proposed law, all that Mr. Bush and the Congress says is pure baloney. American citizens need to focus on the next president, not the present one. What will he or she actually do? If the next president wants to pander to people who came into this country illegally, just to buy votes, we citizens are royally screwed!

Illegal+immigration President+Bush Congress

Adding Something New

2007-06-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

The best way to get over the agony of writing a book is to begin anther book. I just sent to a publisher my book General Morgan’s Legacy. It is a novel about a modern man who stumbled across information about the Confederate General John Hunt Morgan as he escaped from a Yankee prison in 1863. The book consists of two stories intertwined, but separated by about 140 years.

What sparked the book is information about General Morgan that suddenly emerged from an exchange of letters between me and a well-known poet/novelist. It seems this writer’s great-grandfather and my great-grandfather worked together to help Morgan get back to Tennessee so he could once more attack the Union Army.

With this book I will be presenting new information about the Civil War and one of its Generals in the South. Adding to the existing literature on a topic is always fun. Every book I have written (except the one on time travel—Time Out of Joint) has done just that.

I interrupted the writing of another book to finish the Morgan book. I was getting bogged down into too much detail in my newest book, Ploughshares into Swords. That book tells what civilians did to assist the WWII war effort, and in particular what the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) did both with artillery rockets and the atom bomb. In that book I will be adding to the literature about the Bomb and about rocketry. Perhaps Caltech as well.

In between chapters of Ploughshares I am writing about a curious turn of events that occurred during the Cold War. Armed with grudging information obtained from US intelligence agencies under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I will be able to put together a story that will upset several writers of CIA expose’ books of the past decades. What they said in part was not true, either because they did not know, or because they did know but were not allowed to tell.

It is always fun to add new facts to old, established history.

Caltech CIA Confederacy General+John+Hunt+Morgan Civil+War FOIA Wendell+Berry WWII Rockets

Moral Superiority

2007-06-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy I was brought up in an Episcopal church in the South. I loved that church, its members and the priest. Many years later I still think of him. He was a successful minister of a rapidly growing church. He was rewarded by being made the evangelistic bishop of Wyoming—a place where there were few people and where he could do no damage, preaching to sheep and cattle. One thing about him—he was not political. Neither were the cattle he was left to minister to.

Now look at the Episcopal Church in America. Highly political, very politically correct, full of leaders with huge egos, and congregations that are diminishing in size. It seems its impending failure is unimportant as long as the egos get all the attention they need and as long as politics are the Church’s message to the world. I feel like weeping for the Episcopal Church which has become a testimony to the things that are temporal.

Episcopal leaders aren’t the only ones to seek what they understand—the political—and avoid the religious, which remains a mystery. I suspect the ministers of such churches are not confident in their calling or they wouldn’t have scrambled after each popular cause that came down the pike.

I recall the story of the leader of a Methodist church who was given a Viet Cong flag in the early 1970’s and conducted a march through the streets of his conservative town bravely flying the flag of Communists. A large portion of his membership fled to other churches in the area and never returned. So the minister wrecked his own church and no doubt feels morally superior to those who left, even thirty years later. After all, the “right thinking” people stayed, didn’t they? That feeling of moral superiority must be important to some.

One thing the Judeo-Christian ethic teaches us about moral superiority is that no one has a monopoly on it. The insignificant widow in the Bible who gave two small coins, gave all she had, which was far more than the significant wealthy people gave. And the widow wasn’t giving out of a desire moral superiority, she was giving out of a sense of love. I, for one, am not sure how love fits into the moral superiority scheme of things.

Moral+Superiority Episcopal Methodist Religion Politics

Bishops Lobby for Illegals

2007-06-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article in my local newspaper today by Norberto Santana, Jr. It is an opinion piece presented as news that tells how Catholic bishops are lobbying to keep families together. That is, to force the U.S. Government to keep Catholic kids with their parents in the U.S. In other words, to open the borders. It is the Moral thing to do.

Even though I have tremendous respect for the Catholic Church, I can see two things are wrong with this approach. One is the bishops’ moral high ground. They forget it is immoral to invade the borders of another country, break its laws, steal people’s identities and divide one’s own family. The bishops need to be talking to citizens of other countries in those countries, not in the U.S. Americans are hard-working, law-abiding, egalitarian and respectful, and they do not invade the borders of Latin-American countries.

The second thing I see wrong with this approach by bishops is that it focuses on Catholic families. There are other families that become divided. What happens to the families of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants? Don’t they also leave families behind? Surely those families need to be kept together as well. Their Moral issues are just as strong.

Perhaps the morality of keeping families together is the wrong method of attack. It is highly emotional but can’t stand scrutiny.

Having been a factory manager in North Hollywood, CA, Toronto, Canada and Albany, New York, I have some experience. All these sites had their share of Hispanic workers. Hispanic people were terrific but they had no monopoly on working hard or of leaving families behind.

Illegal+Immigration Catholic+Bishops U.S.+Borders Identity+Theft Morality

Illegals and all that Jazz

2007-05-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

Some people in the media are trying to make me apologize to the illegals who broke our laws and sneaked across the border. I am sorry, I just don’t feel guilty about their lawlessness.

And now President Bush has decided I am un-American if I question the Senate bill on immigration. I am getting it from all sides and still I am not feeling guilty. I know I should look ashamed, but I just cannot bring myself to that point.

I have read the arguments in favor of the Senate bill and do not understand what is going on. Every point in the argument that assures me about how great the future will be with the new law, is invalid because we already have laws about the same topics that we do not enforce. And now I am expected to believe Big Brother will enforce a new set of laws?

I am especially concerned when I see laws that say illegals will not be hounded by the IRS for back taxes, but I, a law-abiding citizen of many years will be hounded day in and day out by the tax collectors.

President Bush may suddenly be very concerned about the illegal immigrant question, but he does not tie the hands of future presidents. If the next president belongs to a political party that is soft on crime and coddles criminals in order to get votes, we will be far worse off with the proposed Senate bill.

There are people who believe a new law, some act by a bunch of loud, opinionated fat people in Washington, DC, will fix what a previous law, enacted by a bunch of loud, opinionated fat people in Washington, DC, failed to fix. Laws don’t cut it—actions cut it. We have enough laws and not enough enforcers.

Immigration Illegal+Immigration Senate President+Bush Border+Security

Congress Shall Make No Law

2007-05-18T16:15:00.000-07:00

The First amendment to the Constitution is a beautiful thing. It says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Nothing wrong with the First Amendment, except that it does not go far enough. The Founding Fathers did not seem to think the Judicial Branch would make laws, but it does. So the First Amendment should read: Congress and the Supreme Court shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Surely this small change could easily get enough states to ratify it so that it would become the law of the land. And not a minute too soon.

Congress Politics First+Amendment Constitution Supreme+Court

Back to School

2007-05-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was invited to the retirement party of a principal of a highly successful middle school. I had not seen him for three years, or the school or the teachers. But there was a time when I knew them all quite well, because I had worked at the school as a substitute teacher.

Substitute teaching was a fluke for me, a time filler after I retired from industry as a manager of people who ran factories. Teaching is quite a different undertaking, but my wife was a very good teacher in public schools and I felt I learned enough from her to try it, myself. I’ve always had a very high opinion of teachers, and of my wife’s professionalism, so I could not think of any calling more useful.

It took a while to learn how to deal with kids in the school environment. I found it was an honor to work with most of the students. And it was a privilege to work with the other teachers. The school district was one of the best in California and the school one of the best in its district. But I didn’t know it when I was so busy figuring out math and science lessons on the spur of the moment.

When I was invited to the retirement party, I went, honored to be remembered. It was a big party with officials and teachers from all over. I knew many of them somewhat and a few of them very well. I had forgotten how well. There were hugs and handshakes all around. Some tears on my part, too.

That chapter in my life was finally over last Friday afternoon. I had spent most of my life in industry, but the last eight years I spent in the classroom have a special glory. As a teacher, I learned that there is hope for tomorrow because of the bright, idealistic boys and girls we are training today. I wish more retired people would make the effort to see what really goes on in our public school classrooms, and who the heroes in our cities really are.

Congratulations, Dr. Joe Fox of Dana Middle School in Arcadia, California.

Arcadia+California Teaching education

FDR Lied and People Died!

2007-05-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

While doing research for my new book, Swords into Ploughshares (which is about the contribution of Caltech during WWII), I came across the history of the beginnings of WWII. Isolationists tried very hard to keep us out of the war. So did some Communists, for their own reasons. But then Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor and other places, and then Germany also declared war, so we had no choice but to stand and fight. Very few isolationists in Congress held out for peace.

We had not been in the war very long before unhappy people began circulating rumors that Franklin D. Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and just let it happen so he could get us into the war. They dreamed up worse theories that that, but the one that stuck was the one about knowing what the Japanese were up to. As soon as the war was over and Roosevelt was dead, the rumors arose again.

Books were published about Roosevelt’s supposed evil plan. Those were the days when, if something were put into print, it was supposed to be true, so many people believed it. Nowadays, we are used to seeing all kind of junk in print and on the Internet, but in 1946, such books had more credence.

I was young at the beginning of WWII and not a Roosevelt fan, but intuitively I knew the rumors were baseless. They proved to be so; or at least no one was able, in the past sixty years, to prove the rumors were true. Roosevelt had plenty of enemies in his Democrat party and in the Republican party, so there was no end to the efforts of many people to try to convict Roosevelt of some kind of perfidy.

If all this sounds familiar, so be it. You can hardly find a period in which the same rumors have not been resurrected and applied. Tongues will always wag, and some people will believe anything.

But if you have lived a while, such accusations become tiresome.

Franklin+Roosevelt George+Bush Politics WWII Pearl+Harbor Leftists

We Are Still Guilty

2007-05-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have come to expect one or more people to say after a huge tragedy, “In a sense we are all guilty.” It never fails that some ass decides to try this banal tack and in so doing, attempt to sound wise.

Recently, in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings of thirty-two students, I believe it was Barack Hussein Obama, the presidential candidate, who was the first to make such a pronouncement. It was indirect, but it was really what he said.

I have never connected the “In a sense” words to any political group. There are plenty of asses to go around in most political parties. But this morning I saw in a column by Dr. Thomas Sowell a statement that made me wonder. He wrote, “A reader writes: ‘Liberals hold us individually responsible for nothing but collectively responsible for everything.’”

Now I am beginning to wonder . . . “Collectively responsible for everything?” Could it be that Liberals have been leaders in the large field of saying, “In a sense we are all guilty”?

A Liberal gentleman once told me very affirmatively about his theology as he stated “We are all God.” I took that to be a collective personal conclusion and told him not to hang that awesome responsibility on me.

But I wonder. It has been so many years since I was a Liberal that I have forgotten all the tenets of Liberalism.

In a sense, we are all guilty of forgetting.

Barack Obama Politics Liberals Thomas Sowell Virginia Tech

AAUW Strikes Again

2007-04-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

There was a Reuters story in my local newspaper recently entitled “Pay Gap Between Sexes Proves Persistent”. It was amusing because it was researched by the AAUW, the American Association of University Women. What would you expect them to find? That women had made progress? No, and I seem to recall that the NAACP found that there are not enough Black men in baseball, too (since black Hispanic men were considered Hispanic and not black).

In my experience with several accomplished AAUW women, I have noted one important thing: they were highly political--Liberal Left Wingers, and their local AAUW chapter appeared to be a wing of the Liberal Democrat Party. Liberals love to find victims and they have attempted to portray women as victims in this story.

The implied political moral of this AAUW study is, “Under the present administration, women have suffered. Vote the straight Democrat ticket.” In other words, this carefully constructed study is a political statement.

Having spent a career in various industries including three years on General Electric’s corporate staff, I can say that many companies are dedicated to hiring and promoting women and to making very sure that women get paid just as much as men for the same or similar types of work. There are governmental penalties for doing otherwise, but there are benefits also. Women have proven to be valuable, committed, achieving employees.

There are other studies showing women have made great progress in the past thirty years. I would hope to see an article about one of these by Reuters, but I will not hold my breath.

AAUW Reuters Media Politics Liberal

Sobering Wisdom about Don Imus

2007-04-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I learn something good about good people. While listening to a talk radio show yesterday, I heard a black woman talk to the host about the ugly thing Don Imus said about most likely fine, achieving young women Imus did not even know. It was demeaning both to the women and their race. Imus was no doubt quoting rappers he had heard many times, but there is no useful purpose in repeating such talk, no matter who says it.

The mother who called, said that Imus' remarks did not affect her one way or the other, except to show that Imus may be an idiot. In other words, Imus’ words reflected on him, not anyone else.

When asked how the woman’s daughter might feel, she said something the wisdom of which struck me like a hammer. She said, and I wrote it down, “Imus does not carry her joy in his mouth.” She said more in a few words than all the “tut-tutters” put together in the days following.

I am sorry that in 2007 people are still saying the things that Imus repeated. But I am glad that it brings out the innate wisdom of people and that they can share it with a large audience.

Don Imus can be fired, but he will only go to another network and re-establish himself. He is that popular. But maybe some people will wake up and decide that derogatory talk diminishes those who say it.

Imus Race+baiting Al+Sharpton Jesse+Jackson

John Hunt Morgan and Two Mothers-in-Law

2007-04-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

There is a reason for my absence from this blog. I have been finishing a book. It is about the clandestine affair of the escape of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan from a Yankee prison in 1863, among other things and is called General Morgan’s Legacy.

While I have been writing I have not been keeping up with the news. But when I came up to the surface of current events, I was amazed at the escapade of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Her trip to the Middle East seems fraught with concerns for the President and the State Department. And for the future.

Suppose in 2008 Mrs. Clinton wins the election and Mrs. Pelosi is still Speaker of the House. Mrs. Pelosi decides that Mrs. Clinton is not handling foreign affairs to her (Pelosi’s) satisfaction and Mrs. P. decides to talk directly with Middle Easterners about it. Would we soon find that there is room in Washington for only one mother-in-law? I suspect we would.

And there would be a great fall-out that would go far beyond any mere Conservative-Liberal disagreement so far.

John+Hunt+Morgan Civil+War Nancy+Pelosi Hillary+Clinton Conservatives Liberals

Doing Good Deeds

2007-03-09T22:54:00.000-08:00

Cryptograms fascinate. While I am told that poets make very good writers of prose, I am no good at poetry. But I find that cryptograms help me visualize words.

You know what cryptograms are, a statement by someone in which the letters of the words are all substituted by other letters. I began decoding one recently that went this way:

DY DH BLY IBLVXF. . .

I saw right away that DY DH is probably IT IS, and the BLY could be NOT. I went on in this vein and decoded the statement this way:

IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO DO A GOOD DEED. ONE MUST BE INVOLVED IN IT WHOLE-HEARTEDLY. EACH ACTION SHOULD BE PERFORMED WITH LIFE AND SOUL, WITH EVERY LIMB, WITH ALL ONE’S VITALITY. (ABRAHAM HESCHEL)

I found that Rabbi Heschel was considered a very profound thinker of the twentieth century, but I am thinking he must have been difficult to live with.

“What is wrong,” I thought to my self, “With just quietly slipping a hungry man five bucks for a burger?”

Truly, different strokes for different folks. Maybe I should do more crossword puzzles.

cryptograms charity

Write Fast

2007-03-06T19:36:00.000-08:00

The humorist Calvin Trillin was quoted as saying, “In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not come to pass while his article is still on the presses.”

Calvin was not especially interested in science. But if he were he could say the same thing about this field. I wrote a story that had a lot to do with time travel and other scientific feats. Between the time I began the story, Time out of Joint, and the time I ended the story, some 350 pages later, there were important developments in science that made part of my story obsolete. So now I am doing a sequel.

Time was when we kids would have done almost anything to own a two-way radio that was ten times as large as a cell phone and full of delicate vacuum tubes, but such a thing was impossible with the current technology. Within forty years many people had tiny, rugged two-way radios in the form of cell phones that worked almost every time they were tried.

When I taught in middle schools maybe three years ago, I told students many times, “This is a great time to be alive!” The technology available to everyone, including kids, would have stunned the average person in the 1950’s.

From a technological standpoint, it is a great time to be alive.

But you have to write fast.

Calvin+Trillin Science Technology Writing Science+Fiction

Haters

2007-02-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

Vice President Cheney escaped an attempt on his life today in Afghanistan. I read it and was glad that he was not injured or killed, the same as I would be glad that any other vice president escaped danger. Then I began to hear about the ugly things that were being said on the Internet, about how sorry people were that the enemy missed Mr. Cheney. These bloggers and writers expressed hatred for a man they did not even know.

I remember hearing about children stamping their feet and saying, “I hate you1” to their mothers or fathers. But we expect children to grow out of those attitudes. Apparently some adults did not. When adults express such hatred for each other, serious fireworks can often follow. That is why it is important to learn to control ourselves at an early age.

If I were a psychologist or other practitioner of the dark arts, I might wonder about the relationship between these writers of hatred and their parents. But I am not. All I know is that hatred is unhealthy.

One other thing: a person who hates his country is very likely to hate its leaders.

Dick+Cheney Afghanistan Liberals Child+psychology current+events suicide+bombers

Challenge to Daylight Saving Time

2007-02-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

This very day I was asked a very important question by a fan who loves my blog (yes, there is one). She thought I was wise enough to know all kinds of things and asked,

“What is the purpose of Daylight Savings Time?” It is a timely question because sooner that usual we are going to have to make an adjustment. March 11, I believe.

My correspondent, who is old enough to enjoy telling her age, has the initials MM. I refer to her as MM and imagine that she is really Marilyn Monroe because I have seen pictures of her as a young lady.

Here is the wisdom I laid on her about the purpose of Daylight Savings Time:

Dear MM,

The sole purpose of Daylight Savings Time is to refresh one's memory about the location of each clock and timer in his or her abode. I seem to have 43 of the things. Twice a year I am forced to reacquaint myself with all the devices as I reset them. They lurk in strange, hard to-get-to places in dark corners, such as on top of the water conditioner on which dwells black spiders that have red symbols of death on their shiny bodies.

It takes me about a week to change every timing device during which period many things go bump in the night and angry mail delivery people get wet in the day when the sprinklers go off inappropriately. It is always a race to see if I can find them before there is a lawsuit filed against me.

If you need any more help on this or any other topic, please let me know.

Daylight+Saving Marilyn+Monroe

An Old War Story

2007-02-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

Pryor House, ca 1859

In a January 13 post to this blog I wrote “Homage to Writers” in which I said that the poet/novelist Wendell Berry and I were researching a project. His great-grandfather Frank Pollard and my great-grandfather Will Pryor both helped Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan escape from the Yankees in December of 1863. Pollard and Pryor may not have known each other; they lived several miles apart.

Pollard helped first. Morgan and his aide Captain Hines then went to Pryor’s house. Hines knew Pryor before the War, and after it they served together on the Kentucky Supreme Court. The two Confederate warriors went back to Tennessee where a new army was formed and they continued to torment Yankee forces until Morgan was killed. Hines became a sort of “super-spy” for the CSA.

In the course of investigation, I came across records of Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio. It was a prison for captured Confederate soldiers and political prisoners. Camp Chase was the prison where Will Pryor was sent in 1862. He was a prominent lawyer in central Kentucky and a political prisoner. (My November 28, 2006 post dealt with the letter President Lincoln wrote about paroling Will Pryor.) Camp Chase was also the prison from which General Morgan and some of his officers escaped on November 27, 1863.

The records of Camp Chase were revealing. They included self-congratulatory documents about what a fine Christian prison it was, as well as letters from prisoners who told what a hell-hole it was. There were also official records each month telling how many and what kinds of prisoners were kept there, and how many escapes occur ed. But I am not sure how accurate the records were. During the month of November, 1863 when Gen. Morgan and five others escaped, the official count of escapes was zero.

There were side issues as well. Columbus was near the Congressional district (if not in it) where Clement Laird Vallandigham (the Copperhead) was elected to the House. Thus there was in the prison record a compilation of election results and some comments. The recorder was against the election of Vallandigham, so the comments were not favorable. Since President Lincoln brought about the destruction of some 200 printing presses of newspapers in the North with whom he disagreed, very few favorable comments about Vallandigham are still in the records. Because I am a first cousin, several times removed, of Vallandigham, I take notice of these comments.

This search into history has been rewarding as it has been fun. It has reinforced the lore handed down by both Wendell’s and my families. When Kentucky Justice Thomas H. Hines wrote about his adventure in 1891, he included the names of those who had helped him and Morgan escape. Pollard and Pryor were both included. Few seem to have known about Pollard’s assistance but Pryor had to flee to Canada until after the war was over. Pryor took the rap.

Far from over, the research will no doubt lead to some kind of article or book. At the moment I do not know which of us will write it. And I do not care as long as the story is told.

Civil+War Wendell+Berry John+Hunt+Morgan Clement+Laird+Vallandigham Copperhead

Global Cooling Off Period Needed

2007-02-07T15:44:00.000-08:00

It is amusing to watch and read the Media reporting on Global Warming. The latest position is that we should all believe in “Warming Caused by Humans” because of scientific consensus. That is, a number of scientists have agreed that the earth is warming, that the warming is caused by human activity and that the warming is bad.

They are laboring under the notion that consensus = fact. Some of us think, no, we know, that consensus = groupthink. Groupthink is seldom a good substitute for fact. Groupthink is not even scientific.

Can 50,000 Frenchmen be wrong? Of course they can be wrong. The history of Science is full of episodes about the lone individual who recognized truth when he saw it, and paid the price when he faced the wrath of groupthinkers. James Clerk Maxwell, for instance, was almost universally sneered at by scientists when he connected light with electromagnetism.

No doubt some scientists are convinced that global warming is caused by humans and that it is bad. One can rightfully ask, “How many of these scientists are meteorologists?” And the answer is not many. Few real meteorologists are so dogmatic as to make such dire predictions that show up in the Media. In fact, some meteorologists have dared to question groupthink.

So there are two sides to this question, after all. One is groupthink and the other is heresy. There are always more groupthinkers than heretics, so consensus is always going to be powerful.

What is the answer? Will groupthink finally be found to be correct?

Clearly the average man is due a cooling-off period while each side searches for very hard to obtain facts. It is too early to conclude anything.

Global+Warming Science politics Media meteorology

Hillary Clinton & Hugo Chavez

2007-02-03T11:20:00.000-08:00

Hillary and Hugo have more in common than their initials and choice of careers. They both want to steal the profits of successful companies. Hillary said recently that she would take Exxon’s profits and use them for programs of her own devising. This is very hard to find on the Internet news sources because the Left finds her statement embarrassing. But she said it, and she meant it. Hugo the dictator just does it.

It is important to remember a few things about profits:

Profits are not Hillary’s to take. Income does not belong to the government.

Hillary’s proposed theft (a wrong) is not justified by the use she would put the funds (ends do not justify means).

Exxon’s profits occurred in spite of falling oil prices, indicating an adept management, not dishonesty of some kind.

Profit is not a dirty word in a capitalistic society—only to the Left.

Many “little guys” depend on the profits of Exxon and other companies for their incomes.

Profits of successful companies are already taxed twice.

If the price of success is governmental seizure, then expect a slower economy and less tax revenues. People react to governmental pressure.

Hillary’s reactionary purpose runs counter to a free society; it tells us a great deal about the real character of the woman and her Socialistic biases.

Exxon Hillary+Clinton Politics Economics Business

Washington Comedian

2007-01-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

It was Will Rogers who said, “It’s easy to be a comedian. You have the entire Government working for you.”

How can I say that? Well, the Senate just gave a vote of confidence to the new four star general David H. Petraeus, and wished him “God Speed,” and other things that would sound good in the Media, then set to work trying to cut his support out from under him while encouraging the enemy.

Of course, this betrayal was called “patriotic.”

Will Rogers was right.

Petraeus Senate Will+Rogers Iraq+War

Nagging the Buggers

2007-01-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting parts of writing something original is doing the research. Yesterday I got a call from the NSA, a super-secret intelligence agency. They wanted to tell me about the work they had done in response to a request I made.

I have been writing about someone who was involved in the space program for two governments in the 1960’s. He died a couple of years ago and on his way out, he told me lots of things he had done. He was a very modest man whose life included huge achievements. I have come to realize that he wanted me to write about them, but he didn’t want to ask.

Before I write about anyone of the Cold War era , I consider whether his or her life involved secrets. Then I try to determine which agency might have information about him. I make my requests to the agencies first, because they take the longest. Usually, it is the FBI or the CIA. But I knew my subject reported to two intelligence agencies and that he was not allowed to tell one what he had told the other. I bet that one of them was NSA. And I bet right.

An acquaintance in a chat room had once worked with the NSA. He advised me not to “ping” the NSA. It was too late. I had already sent them a request fax. After all, they have a web site saying they have a Freedom of Information Office. So I requested information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And several weeks later they called me.

A very nice lady told me that the person I was searching for had indeed been a contractor and told me which years. She added that they had destroyed his file twenty years ago and had nothing left but an indoctrination form with his signature on it. I was floored! I was sure the NSA would never admit to hearing his name uttered in their offices or even in the environment of Washington, DC. I thanked the lady and hung up the phone.

Then I thought about it for a moment. The word “contractor” almost sounded like my friend was hired by the agency for pay. He was an ex-army officer, a well-established professional man who didn’t need the money, and I knew he would never accept pay for assisting his government. So I called back.

This time, I startled the lady who had talked to me a few minutes before. I asked what a “contractor” was to them in the 1960’s. She stammered a bit but finally responded that he was not an employee, but was a person who was lent to them by another, er company.

I am working on the other, er, company for more information as this is being written. I hope they are just as helpful.

By the way—the Federal Government does not all throw away all copies of anything. It was only a few years ago that I wrote a book based on the files of the Secret Service from 1873. They were in a dusty corner of the National Archives. Maybe my great granddaughter will dig something out about this friend before she dies. She is two years old as I write this.

NSA writing CIA FOIA Cold+War Space+Program

Homage to Writers

2007-01-13T22:27:00.000-08:00

I can guess how they felt, the two teenagers who wrote me thank-you notes because I gave them copies of two of my books at Christmas time. The kids probably felt embarrassed at having to submit their writing skills to a man who writes books. But they did a good job.

The reason I know how they could have felt is that today I sent a letter to one of America’s finest writers, and I was very careful to be on my best writing behavior as I did it.

The author was Wendell Berry, and when he writes a book, it is immediately reviewed by the N.Y. Times and the L. A. Times. Wendell’s great-grandfather and my great-grandfather lived in the same town at the same time, and both seemed to have helped Gen. John Hunt Morgan (CSA) escape from the Yankees in 1863. We have been comparing notes for some time. (A bit of the story about my ancestor and President Lincoln’s dealings with him can be found on this web site in my Nov. 28 Post to this Blog.)

So, I was nervous about writing to Wendell. And I can say it here because I know he will never see this Blog; he is famous for avoiding computers. Well, maybe there is a crack in his armor. Most of his notes to me have been hand-written. But I noticed his last letter had been composed on a computer.

Maybe someday Wendell will become sloppy with the rest of us keyboard bangers.

Wendell+Berry Writing Civil+War

Screwing the Stockholder/Citizen

2007-01-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

It was about 1955 that a wonderful British movie was released in America. It was called, I’m All Right, Jack and its star was an unknown actor named Peter Sellers. He went on to great fame from this first movie.

The story was about a factory in England that was not doing well. Its owner had given up. He was retiring and moving to a nudist colony on the beaches, somewhere. As he left, he had his nephew, a bright and enterprising industrial engineer, try to modernize the business.

It turned out that everyone in the business had his fingers in the revenue stream—that is what the “I’m all right, Jack” expression means (I’ve been taken care of). So from the humblest hourly employee to the union steward to the managers, everyone was quite comfortable. And they all fought the young man as he tried to make the business profitable. No one would admit what he was doing, though.

By the end of the movie, the enterprising young industrial engineer had given up and also retired to the nudist colony to join his uncle. The corrupt business was a metaphor for British industry and its moribund economy of the times.

As a long-time employee of General Electric with three years on its corporate staff, I have seen the same “I’m all right Jack” attitude in various G.E. operations. And in quiet moments spent alone with people in other companies I have found the story to be similar in their experiences.

Why isn’t it all right to be “All Right, Jack”? It is because there is a group left out of each population of comfortable people—the stockholders. The people who are “All Right” are systematically screwing the stockholders! There is no one in the business who is looking out for its owner.

Extreme examples are General Motors and Ford, whose management slowly gave away their business to labor unions. Employee benefits are so huge that these companies cannot compete with manufacturers from outside the U.S.

Screwing the stockholder has become a standard practice in America. And the practice did not stop with industry. It went on to Congress, where the American public has become the stockholders with Congress as managers and professional bureaucrats as hourly workers. Slowly but steadily Congress and its helpers are screwing us stockholders (citizens). And there is no one who is looking out for us. Certainly it is not the media. The media “is all right, Jack.”

Congress Politics General+Electric General+Motors Ford+Motors Media

Show-Biz Congress and Wages

2007-01-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

Congresspeople seem overly worried about the “little man” these days. They want him to have a raise in wages. But they don’t want to pay for the raise. They want you and me to pay for the raise, as usual. So Congressmen will soon vote to raise the federal minimum wage. It is a perfect solution to a non-problem. It will not cost them anything, it will attract votes because of their compassion, and the raise will do no good at all. In fact, it may harm some of the “little people,” but it will look good and that is all that counts. It is simply a matter of putting on a good show; after all Congresspeople are in show-biz of a sort all the time.

Economics is a study of supply and demand. Economists know that when the price of something rises, people will use less of it. Raise the price of labor and fewer laborers will be employed. But more people will leave school to fill those higher-priced jobs.

The real reason for raising the federal minimum wage is that it pleases labor unions. And labor unions provide a great deal of money and other support for politicians in whom they are well pleased. Labor unions use the minimum wage to boost their demands for more money for the people they represent.

In the United States for the past 200 years there has been a steady increase in wages. Was this increase due to pressure from labor unions or people in Congress establishing minimum wages? Certainly not. The increase in wages has been due to a shortage in laborers in this country. That is why the United States is a country of immigrants!

There has been a steady pressure to bring in people from other countries to fill the demand for workers, because private individuals have created millions of jobs. Government wastes, private individuals create.

It is simple economics again—if the demand for something grows, the price you pay for it will rise. Labor is no exception.

Some say people in Congress are aware of the demand curve. I say they are too busy putting on a good act and too ignorant of economics to be aware of the most simple economic facts. They are better at dropping their pants than they are at dropping the price of something. They are better at posing and being “shocked and surprised” than they are at actually doing something useful.

Congress will no doubt pass an increase in the federal minimum wage very soon. And they will feel good, despite the damage they will have caused. But Congresspeople won’t know the difference and they will congratulate each other as if they did.

And we pay these people, the ruling class, huge sums of money to wander around blindly and do really dumb things!

minimum+wage politics Congress

Ruling Class of America

2006-12-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

Many of us have recognized for some time that when members of Congress talk about taxing the income of the rich, they really are working from the view that all income is theirs (the government’s) and they will let the rich keep some of it. It would perhaps better if the government taxed wealth, instead of income. But that would affect the Teddy Kennedys of the country and they would never allow that.

Two days ago in my local paper there was a story that said the Supreme Court of California will decide whether a law that was passed overwhelmingly by the people of that State, is constitutional. The Supremes start out with the notion that all laws are unconstitutional and THEY will decide what we will and will not have on our law books. Since what they decide is often formed from their whims about what life should be like, and not from existing laws, this is a kind of double slap in the face of citizens. I suspect that nine cheap lawyers in black robes are no better qualified to make these decisions than are the people of California.

Our Constitution was written to protect us from government. It puts limits on ALL three branches. But the imperious ruling class tends to forget that.

Supreme+Court California+Supreme+Court Politics Taxes Congress Constitution

Judge Sides with Bush on Terrorism Law

2006-12-14T07:53:00.000-08:00

In an AP story this morning (where it was hard to find) Judge James Robertson of the Federal District Court said “detainees (at Guantanamo Bay) can’t challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.” Originally, the judge said the prisoners could challenge their imprisonment in federal courts. Then Congress passed a law that said otherwise and for some reason, the judge must have actually read what Congress had passed.

How long the judge’s ruling will last is open to question. He is the same Clinton-appointed judge who ordered the government to change the style of U.S. currency. The Constitution is clear about the responsibility for designing money and it explicitly appointed another branch of the government to handle that duty. It goes to show that the Constitution is not an impediment to much judicial thinking, these days.

Coddling criminals and extending to aliens the same rights as citizens is a fairly recent battle that belongs in the land of the Liberal, not the land of the Constitution. But the handling of enemy combatants is not new.

When President Lincoln enacted his tough laws against northern citizens (most of whom happened to be in the opposite political party), he usurped the powers of Congress. Only Congress can suspend the right of Habeas Corpus, for instance—not a president. But Lincoln did it anyway. The question during the Civil War was not “Shall a President act in a tyrannical way towards citizens of another country (CSA)?” Rather, it was “Shall a president act in a tyrannical way toward the citizens of his own country?” Where was the Supreme Court during this period? Shamefully hiding under its collective desk. Meanwhile Lincoln had some 13,000 American civilians in the north tried by military tribunals and tossed into prison (Doubt what I say? Read your history books for this period.)

During the Civil War, most of Congress and the President were on the same side of the issues, so the President’s actions suited Congress. Jointly they raped the public and took away their rights as though American citizens were aliens. Now, during the Iraq war, many who are in Congress and on the federal bench are not on the same side as the President and therefore feel obliged to make sure enemy combatants are given the full rights of American citizens.

Why should enemy combatants have the same rights that American citizens have? Beats me. Not even the weird Supreme Court of the 1860’s could come up with that.

Supreme Court
Habeas Corpus Abraham Lincoln Civil War Guanamo Bay
Conservatives

Cousin Horace

2006-12-02T19:45:00.000-08:00

Finding a long lost cousin is usually a pleasure. Ten years ago I went to central Kentucky near Lexington, from the Los Angeles area to conduct research on my family. I had a question to ask of the man who was in charge of the Georgetown City cemetery. It is a beautiful place. He did not have the answer, but offered me a list of people who might know the answer. One on the list was a cousin I had not seen or heard of in forty-five years.

I called Horace Grover Gaines, my cousin. It took some convincing, but soon he showed up at the cemetery office to answer my questions directly. He was a big, nice looking man with an eye patch. He was definitely pirate material. Older than I by about nine years, He had been undergoing surgery on the cornea of one eye. It was clearly uncomfortable for him, but genealogy was important and I was going back to California soon. So he stayed with me and took me around town and his farm which had historical significance for several reasons.

The caretaker of the cemetery was very deferential to Horace, so I figured Horace was an important man in the community. Among other things Horace was the director of the cemetery. He was also the director of the biggest bank in town and served on the board of education, the draft board (in times past), and all sorts of community endeavors.

Horace was immensely likeable. And knowledgeable about our family in common. He had paintings of our ancestors in his home. He had records I had never imagined. But I had something for him as well: I convinced Horace that the farm he owned had been carved from the Kentucky wilderness by our common ancestors in 1783.

I felt bad because I had not known Horace longer. He was a good, intelligent man and a funny one besides. Over the next few years we corresponded often and swapped information. I wrote magazine articles based on his data and almost got the Louisville PBS station to conduct a search on his farm for signs of our Revolutionary War ancestors. But they backed out at the last minute.

I did not know Horace was a war hero, a wounded veteran of Pacific battles in WWII. I also did not know that Horace’s mind was slipping into Alzheimer’s disease. I should have suspected something because he did not remember my mother, a pretty woman whom most men did not forget.

I did get back to Georgetown a few years later with my wife. I was pleased that she got to know Horace and that we met Horace’s daughter and her children before Horace was carried away by his disease. His wife had died. He had a wonderful woman friend who helped take care of Horace until the end, which came on October 14, 2006.

I read that this nation is losing around one thousand of its WWII veterans every day. Horace was just one of those statistics. Until, that is, I set up a web page for him. It will stay on the Internet until I am another statistic.

Kentucky

False Imprisonment

2006-11-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

So there I was, about to turn off my computer a couple of days ago, and thinking about my great-grandfather Pryor. I had just written a small item about him for an attached web site. He has been dead almost a hundred years so there wasn’t much new with him. Anyway, I entered his name in the search spot in Google and wow! Up came a site for the sale of historical documents.

One of the documents for sale was a letter written at the Executive Mansion (of the President of the U.S.). The letter was written by Abraham Lincoln to Secretary of War Stanton about what to do with a couple of civilians who were in prison in Ohio.

One of the men was my great-grandfather. I knew he had been in prison at the behest of A. Lincoln but I didn’t know why. I always suspected it was because he had helped Confederate General John Hunt Morgan escape the Yankees in central Kentucky.

My great-grandfather did help Morgan, but the letter from Lincoln was written some eight months before Hunt had escaped! I had been wrong all these years about the reason for prison. Lincoln had tried by military court and imprisoned some 13,500 civilians in the North by the end of the War, so one more or less didn’t matter (KY was a neutral state).

Lincoln used the passive term when he wrote, “It is said that William S. Pryor is in prison . . .” He acted as if he didn’t know about it. But Lincoln’s good friend, Judge James Pryor was William S. Pryor’s fond uncle, and I bet Judge Jim leaned on Honest Abe a bit to let his favorite nephew out of the pokey. Abe, after all, was a very ordinary politician.

So I do not know why my great-grandfather was imprisoned. But I do know he was a lawyer and a good one from the size of his 1859 mansion.

Lawyers tend to lose their law licenses if they have been sent to prison, but imprisonment by Lincoln was reason for a merit badge, not a disbarment, and after the war my great-grandfather not only continued to practice law but also was made a circuit court judge. He served on the circuit for three years and then was appointed Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. He was on that bench for twenty-six years, longer than anybody before or after.

Evidently, prison was a only graduate course.

I still want to find out what pretext was used to imprison him, other than the fact that he was a Democrat and Lincoln was a Republican. Kentucky politics can get rough.

Abraham Lincoln,John Hunt Morgan, Civil War,Kentucky,E.W. Stanton

End of an Obsession

2006-11-21T21:38:00.000-08:00

The only way to end the obsession of writing a book, I have found, is to start writing another book.

writing books

Milton Friedman, 1912-2006

2006-11-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

When I began studying economics in college, the Great Voice in the field was that of John Maynard Keynes, the darling of the Left. He was the entrée. People such as Milton Friedman were side dishes, the cole slaw of economics.

John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory was sturdy and complex, and it obfuscated the fact that the author was basically just another socialist who saw big government as the answer to most problems in a society. It is no mystery that he had a huge influence over President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We students were given the opportunity to read a slender volume called Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. It was not as pretentious and weighty as The General Theory, but it made more sense and was elegant in its reasoning.

Thus it was that I (and many others) came to see that Milton Friedman was a beacon of light in a sea of socialism. Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan also came to that conclusion as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain.

Friedman was not just an economist, he was a political thinker as well. He correctly saw that human freedom and dignity come as a natural result of free markets. For some strange reason, the Leftist Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976.

Over the past forty years Milton Friedman has positively affected the lives of millions and millions of people. His influence will be felt for years into the future by freedom-loving people.

What about John Maynard Keynes? The entrée has become stale. He is seldom mentioned, while the side dish has become the main meal for free countries.

Milton Friedman Economics Freedom John Maynard Keynes

History's Mysteries

2006-11-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

It was a rainy Monday afternoon, that May 4, 1874, when Bill Smoot murdered James M. Walker in a small town in Kentucky. Bill pulled his trigger in front of all the townspeople as a warning. He was the head of the local KKK and Jim Walker had been trying to get the Klan to stop killing people—men, women, little boys and girls alike. The Klan was warning local citizens not to interfere.

It was probably the first time a white man had been killed by the Klan in central Kentucky.

After Jim’s murder, the Klan, along with the sheriff and some others, chased all the “good guys” out of the area, using guns as persuaders. One of the pursued was a deputy U.S. Marshal. It wasn’t until the Federal Marshal of Kentucky got into the act and threatened to jail the sheriff that the chase was broken up.

Smoot was tried by a state court and immediately acquitted. That is the way things worked with state courts. But Smoot was then hauled to Louisville to a Federal Court and tried for interfering with a Marshal in the pursuit of his duties. He was found guilty, with two subordinates, and sent to prison for five years.

That should be the end of the story. But Smoot was out of prison quickly, riding again with his gang.

It seems that on March 3, 1877, with only two days to go in office, President U.S. Grant pardoned Bill Smoot and his two friends. And he raised all kinds of questions.

Jim Walker was my great-grandfather and I had written about the murder and subsequent events. I even wrote what I had heard about a pardon, but the National Archives has been unable to find a copy. Then, last week, someone sent me an image of the Smoot pardon by email!

It seems that President Grant, a Republican, had granted a pardon to a KKK member who was a Democrat, an ignorant day laborer with a strong penchant for drink, with no money, who was from an obscure county in KY. Grant wrote in the pardon that he was encouraged to make the pardon at the behest of two Democrat senators and the Democrat governor of Kentucky.

How does a drunken killer with no money get the attention of such high level people? My research showed that most probably the governor of KY was in the Klan, but I do not know if the U.S. Senators were in the Klan. Even so—why go to all the bother of getting a presidential pardon for this lay-a-bout? Grant wrote in the pardon that Smoot was convicted for an infraction of the “Enforcement Act” (civil rights laws of the time) but Smoot was not convicted for that reason, so the pardon was probably not valid, but he was released anyway..

President Grant’s administration was known for its corruption, but no one seriously claimed that Grant was anything but honest.

Perhaps we will never know why Grant gave the pardon for a specific crime and not a general pardon. Nor will we probably ever know why he did anything about Smoot at all. Nor will we be enlightened about Smoot’s “pull” in high places.

We can speculate that Smoot had information about the Senators and the Governor that would be embarrassing, but that is all. There seems to be nothing about Smoot’s case that would be of benefit to Grant or the Republicans.

It is just one of history’s mysteries.

KKK U. S. Marshals Service

Trash is Trash, Except . . .

2006-10-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

While the news media is trying hard to keep the explicit IMs of Representative Mark Foley on the front pages, it is also trying hard not to know about or print the explicit passages written in books to far more people by Senatorial candidate James Webb in Florida.

Foley is an R and Webb is a D. Maybe that is the difference.

Mark Foley James Webb Politics Media Bias

Benedict Arnold and His Descendants

2006-10-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

One of several families who arrived by boat to establish Rhode Island Colony was the William Arnold clan. He had several children. I am descended from three of those children, but not from the fourth. The fourth son was named Benedict Arnold. No doubt he was a fine man, but it was his grandson or great-grandson who was the infamous traitor to his new country.

It was a pleasure to find that I was not a descendant of the Benedict Arnold clan. But he has plenty descendants in spirit if not in blood. Look at Hanoi Jane Fonda. Benedict just wanted power and position while Jane wanted to enforce her superior wisdom on us. It must have taken a monumental sense of self-importance to betray her country as she did.

Some think Jane Fonda got away with it—that is, was not tried for treason. But she did not get away with it at all. It is true that she did not go to prison, but look at how the general public remembers her. Few would want to be remembered that way.

After researching a book and writing 150 pages of it, I am even more aware of traitors in our midst. I am also aware of how the meanings of words have changed. My book is about the way civilians lived and contributed to the war effort during WWII. During those four years of strife when as many as a thousand military men died during a training mission with no battle going on, the American public put its head down and plugged away toward victory, one day at a time.

A few labor union leaders were the malefactors at home during WWII. They were willing to cripple the war effort just to satisfy their own selfish desires. Some of them were Communist and others were just short-sighted. But for the most part we all worked together to defeat not one, but two enemies.

Yes, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had their detractors in America, but the Axis enemies had no reason to think a change in leadership here would result in a reduction in force of our troops at the battlefield.

Nowadays, the word “patriotic” has changed to mean an action that will weaken our country publicly. Our enemies can see what is going on. They know they can affect our elections because one party has told them so. The stated enemies of our country know they have allies in this land. These allies will shut down our intelligence operations, will open our borders, and will pull out our troops, if they get control of our government. That is called patriotism today but would have been called treachery during WWII years ago. I was there. I remember.

The simple fact is that dissention here results in a stiffening of resolve for our enemies in the Mideast. It kills our young men and women in uniform.

Benedict Arnold wanted power and position. Today, opposers to the protection of American citizens want no less. If they can convince enough Americans to vote their way, they will get their power back; but who will look out for the safety of our citizens?

It won’t be the Benedict Arnolds and the Jane Fondas of the country, the Dainty Americans with no will and no plan.

Jane Fonda Benedict Arnold Hanoi Jane Mid-term elections Traitors

Speaker Denny Hastert

2006-10-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

I see by the newspaper that Speaker of the House Denny Hastert is in trouble. Not because he did something, but because he didn’t do something—fast enough.

Did Mr. Hastert fail to kill Usama binLaden?

Did Mr. Hastert play sex games with a young page girl in his office while on duty?

Did Mr. Hastert lie to a Grand Jury?

Did Mr. Hastert store ninety thousand dollars of marked money in his refrigerator?

Did Mr. Hastert proclaim that gay men were pedophiles?

Did Mr. Hastert loose a child rapist on the public?

He didn’t do any of the above, but they were done by people of the opposite party. There was no outcry.

What did Mr. Hastert do? He failed to expel a Congressman fast enough. The Congressman wrote nasty text messages which Mr. Hastert did not know about. There was no physical damage to another person as a result of Mr. Hastert’s lack of fast action.

Yet, from the outcry of those who either ignored or protected people who were involved in the dastardly deeds listed above, is enormous. The outrage they suppressed when obvious crimes were committed by Democrats has now been found.

It is good to let it out. I did not know the mainstream media had any outrage in their systems at all. They have held it in for so many years that I thought it had atrophied.

And now I understand. Outrage can appear only when it is directed at Republicans.

Understanding always helps.

Dennis Hastert Media Foley House of Representatives Democrats

Gold Stars and Dainty Americans

2006-10-02T09:35:00.001-07:00

It was not very long after the WWII began that lists of names began to appear in the newspaper. These were the names of the local young people who had given everything they had for their country, the ones who were killed by the enemy, or were killed by accident or friendly fire. Every day for four years more names were listed.

Small banners began appearing in windows of houses. A broad red trim surrounded a white field with at least one star in the middle. A blue star indicated that a member of the family was in the military. A gold star signified that the family in that house had lost a son or a husband or a father (later, it could have been a daughter) in the war. The flags may have turned yellow from exposure to the sun, but they were seldom removed.

In a way, the gold star flags were a comfort to those who also had lost family. The flags made the statement, “You are not alone.” They were also reminders that this particular family had “given until it hurt” to the war effort and until you did at least that much, you should not complain. In every city across the country houses had windows with flags, lots of flags and lots of gold stars. The silence of mourning civilians bore testimony to their dedication to freedom and liberty. They make the whiners and complainers of the present era seem ridiculously small by comparison.

Perhaps this is indeed, the era of the dainty American.

Gold Star Mothers Iraq War WWII Cindy Sheehan

Peacocks and Terrorists

2006-09-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

Recently on an Internet List that concerned itself with genealogy, a few people took a detour about peacocks. Peacocks were not, as I recall, related to any of us. But I read various stories with amusement as people told how the found peacocks in various unlikely parts of the country.

Unable to stand it any longer, I chimed in. I said I had lived in Arcadia, California and could tell a thousand stories about peacocks and none was favorable, except for the rare occasion when I could cheer at seeing a flat one in the roadway. “They ran wild in the city,” I told readers, “and we citizens had to tolerate them. They were a protected species. We could not feed them, chase them off, look at them sideways or do anything else that might be deemed offensive. In fact,” I continued, “Arcadia’s peacocks have almost as many rights as terrorists in U. S. custody.”

I am waiting patiently for a complaint, but so far no one has said anything except one lady who added that “peacocks are terrorists.”

Arcadia, CA Terrorists Guantanimo

Obvious but Unasked Question

2006-09-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

Now that Americans have had their ears hammered by Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and by Mr. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as they addressed the UN and the American press, it is time that someone in the press ask them the obvious question: “May a representative of our government go to your country, get on your national television stations and give his opinion of you and your government?”

Venezuela Iran Ahmadinejad Hugo Chavez Media UN

Media Bias for Sure

2006-09-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

So after writing my last post to this blog I have been looking for some newspaper somewhere to relate what the Australians said to their radical Islamic citizens. Can you imagine that news media people have not found this story worth repeating?

Amazing!

Maybe I was too hard on the media. And then I considered what I heard on the radio this morning on a talk show. Maybe I am not hard enough.

Point One: The New York Times printed what I thought was tantamount to treason when it told the story about how the international banking system was being observed by intelligence agencies to see where terrorists were getting their funding. The Times did this even though their President asked them not to do it.

Did I hear any condemnation from the media for this breach of trust that occurred within its ranks? Not a word.

Point two: ABC ran a docudrama about the “Path to 9/11” and all Hell broke loose. In it the story was told about how our Government failed to take action against our enemies for many years. There was condemnation all over the place from the Media and others.

Conclusion: the Liberal Media does not care about the safety of this nation. It does care a whole lot about the Clinton Legacy.

September 11 Radical Islam Media Bias Australia International Banking New York Times

Aussies Shape up Muslim Immigrants

2006-08-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Australians are fed up with political correctness. Their leadership recently told the Muslim population to accept the political and legal structures of Australia or find another place on the planet.

One of the major concerns of the Australian government was the statement by a Muslim leader that there were two sets of laws—Australian and Sharia. The Sharia law was brought to Australia from Islamic nations. It includes stoning of women and amputating the hands of thieves.

Is the government action just another case of “Islamophobia?” Last year, it was reported that Abdul Nacer Ben Brika, a radical cleric in Melbourne, was asked in an interview whether he thought Australian Muslims had a responsibility to adhere to Australian law.

He replied: "This is a big problem. There are two laws - there is an Australian law and there is an Islamic law."

And the Australian government has replied in effect, “No problems exist. There is one law. You signed on to it when you took the oath of allegiance to our country.”

Australians concluded that it was disrespectful to say of the new homeland, “Your laws are not good enough. We have our own.” And it is disrespectful. Further, what if Baptists suddenly decided to hang Presbyterians for their stand of predestination? Most people would call that “vigilante law” and would stop it in its tracks. Sharia law imposed in Australia or in the U.S. or in England is no different.

Of course, the politically correct and whining crowd has complained bitterly. But the toothpaste is out of the tube.

Add to this the story that news reporter Steve Centanni and a cameraman have been released in Gaza, but not before they converted to Islam at the point of a gun. Those Americans who are tired of having Christians ramming their gospel down their throats by means of persuasion should try Islam at the point of a gun. Some of these Muslim folks are not as peaceful as we have been told.

Sharia Law
Steve Centanni Gaza Palestinians Terrorism

Ocean Cooling with a Thud

2006-08-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

Having held my breath for nine days while I looked for repercussions from a story in my local newspaper, I have finally decided to exhale because it appears there will be no follow-up story, no repercussions, and no retractions.

The story was about our oceans between during the years 2003 and 2005. These enormous bodies of water lost more than twenty per cent of their “global warming heat they’d absorbed over the last fifty years.” How did scientists find this out? Well, there are ARGO temperature floats in the oceans all around the world. They transmit information to satellites and the data are collected at a central point, the National Oceanic and Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

This is rather startling news. It has to play havoc with computer models that regularly predict global warming conditions, especially those that predict future weather data based on the basis of straight line trends.

The reaction of the news media to this story was deafening in its silence. If the news had been different, however, the response might have been quite noticeable. That is, if these data had supported the global warming template many media people have been espousing, then there would have been a Media response no one could have missed.

The Media’s lack of interest in new data tells a story by itself. Instead of hitting the presses, radio and TV waves with a resounding clang, there was a dull thud that interested no one. A news story has to fit the Media’s template or it simply does not get processed and sent out.

It is August and I need a sweater. Maybe there is a reason for it that no one is telling me about.

Oceanography Orange County Register Global Warming Media

Urban Myths Repeated

2006-08-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

In the middle of writing my second book about WWII, I am hearing comments on the radio that sound eerily familiar. In fact, I am finding that much of the same baloney people were spouting during and after WWII is being recycled.

Did you know that President Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor and allowed it to happen so we could go to war?

Did you know that the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fault of the United States because of our policies from about 1927 on?

Did you know that the second world war in Europe was really the fault of the United States because of its part in the Armistice agreement that was reached after WWI?

It is beginning to occur to me that whatever happens, someone will decide that it is the fault of the United States. The reasoning will not even be original—the story teller will use the hackneyed thinking of the previous era to proclaim his findings.

For modern mythology you do not have to change the sentences, just insert a new president’s name and a new country’s name. There is no end to these urban myths.

While in a university course in abnormal psychology I heard a professor talking about a certain type of mental illness in which a person claimed to be wired through his brain to a well-known evil person and the person was telling him what to do. There were so many of these types of stories that they became depressingly tiresome to psychologists and psychiatrists.

One day, a well known psychiatrist became mentally ill and when he was treated, there was a great deal of excitement in the psychological community because the patient had heard it all and certainly would be telling a different story.

Psychologists were deeply disappointed when the learned patient told them, “Well, there is this wire in my brain and I am being controlled by really evil guy, and . . .”

Of course, those were the days of radio and radar. Now we have computers, the nutty stories have graduated to Internets and so on. But they are still the same basic stories.

History really does repeat itself, and in a tiresome way, too.

Writing WWII WWII psychology Urban Myths Conspiracy Theorists

More Nonsense from the New York Times

2006-08-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Recently my son sent me the address to a New York Times article.
So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You
By GINA KOLATA
Published: July 30, 2006

The past 100 years has seen a change from small, sickly people to humans who are so robust their ancestors are almost unrecognizable.

The gist of the story was that someone had looked at the skeletal remains of some fifty Union soldiers and then generalized to the entire American population that we were a small, weak, sickly group of people. What nonsense!

To be sure the skeletons of the 1620 settlers to New England were small. Many of their bones showed that. So did the height of the decks on the replica of the Mayflower which is still in Massachusetts.

But, given the fresh air and good food in America, people began to reach their potentials. Here is a quote about one of my own English/Welsh Pryor ancestors, Samuel, who was born about 1698 in Virginia: “They had ten children, eight sons and two daughters: William, Samuel, John, Thornton, Robert, Luke, Frank, and Joseph; the youngest of the brothers and least of them weighed 220 pounds.”

In addition to the healthy living in the new country one must add the factor of genetics, specifically hybrid vigor, “Increased vigor or other superior qualities arising from the crossbreeding of genetically different plants or animals. Also called heterosis.” In America the gene pool was quite broad and deep. The citizenry was vitalized by the hybrid vigor factor. Americans became a big, energetic, productive and smart nation due to this vigor.

You want proof? Who is the super power in the world today?

So if fifty scrawny Yankee soldiers were not in good shape, so be it. They were not smart or powerful enough to buy their way out of the draft. It is quite possible they were immigrants from ghettoes in European cities.

Whatever the case, there is no scientific support for generalizing to the entire American population from these fifty individuals of unknown origin.

There is no end to nonsense, pseudoscience or cuteness.

New York Times Civil War Genetics Health Politics

The Dim Bulb Society

2006-08-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

There I was, watching an afternoon news show on TV when the electricity went off. Really off—not just for me, but for the entire neighborhood.

It seems that my street and the one behind me are served by electricity from our back yards. There are three transformers that keep us all powered, and two of the three are more than forty years old. They were connected in parallel, which means they helped each other out. So when one blew, increased pressure was put on the other two and they went out rather quickly in the 107 degree heat.

I called Southern California Edison and got a recorded message that no one knew what was wrong with the power in my area, but that they were working on it.

Refrigerators, lamps, fans, hair dryers, computers, everything suddenly gone. But we had flashlights to see around the house at night and battery-powered radios so we could keep up with the rest of the world. But no fans in all the heat.

We did not think we would be without electricity for very long. Besides, a son lived nearby and we could share his air conditioner and lights.

Thoughtful neighbors began running big extension cords across the street so people could get their refrigerators going. Of course, they knew the cables ran in both directions, and they might need help one of these days.

Nothing happened for twenty-four hours. Then a Southern California Edison truck showed up. I talked to the driver, who was surveying the problem. He wanted me to know nothing was going to happen for at least another twenty four hours.

Our son’s power went out. We waited and sweltered. It was almost another twenty-four hours when two trucks showed up, loaded with three transformers. The crew with the truck went to work, removing and replacing all three of them. They were a contract group of no-nonsense linemen. Still it took several hours to remove replace and rewire each of the three, in 105 degree heat. Then we had to wait until a supervisor came along and checked out their work. Finally the OK was given and our electricity was restored, well over two days after the damage occurred.

I thought back over my thirty-five years of living in nice neighborhoods in Southern California and my problems with electric power. Problems seemed to be increasing in severity. My arguments with what I began to call “The Dim Bulb Society” (DBS) had been increasing.

I argued with DBS from the point of some electrical knowledge and with instrumentation. They responded with bureaucratic expressions. At one point I wrote to them, “In 1971 I had an office in Thomas Edison’s first factory in Schenectady, NY. It was built in 1880. In 1880, Thomas Edison knew not to do what you just did.”

And so our differences continued. While their linemen told me what was really going on, I listened to the nonsense from headquarters, spewed by people in air conditioned offices who were far removed from reality. I came to have a lot of respect for the linemen.

I expressed in our newspaper this concern: “If the rise of a few degrees in temperature causes so many problems, what will the Dim Bulb Society do when something really goes wrong?” After all, we are prone to earthquakes and we are at war. There are all sorts of possibilities.

Soon, DBS will begin producing institutional ads proclaiming how wonderful they really are and how dedicated to the customer they are and all that good stuff. But I will not believe them, except in the case of the linemen.

The economics of Power companies is special. As a monopoly, they have no competition. This is a necessary evil in our society. It is important for people to realize that power companies have the need to hide profits. If they do not hide them, they will not get another increase from the public utilities commission. Institutional ads are one way of avoiding profits. So are improved offices and cars for executives. There are all kinds of ways to keep profitability at a low level.

In my novel about the future called Time Out of Joint, I found a way to eliminate power companies. The idea sounds better all the time.

Power Companies Southern California Edison

We Are Going to Starve!

2006-07-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting story on the Internet today about the use of world food supplies for ethanol. That is, the more corn that is converted into alcohol, the less food there will be for starving people to eat. “That means fuel prices can drive up food prices, bad news for the two billion people whose food may fetch a higher price if it fills a gas tank.”

What is needed, “is an international body to oversee the biofuel/food problem. Right now, the author noted, "in effect no one is in charge."

I guess the UN people are too busy raping little girls to give attention to this problem. But as the Communists plainly showed, central planning never worked, anyway. And I can’t imagine that the corrupt officials in the U.N. will pass up an opportunity for another “oil for food” program/scandal to line their pockets.
Maybe central control of oil and food supplies is not the answer. But there is a control.

Perhaps when ethanol makes a dent in the demand for world oil, the price of oil will drop and the need for food to be converted into ethanol will also decline. When the price for corn rises more corn (and rice) will be produced. But most media writers don’t think very far out with their analyses.

There is a wonderful price system that distributes food and oil. On top of that there are several wonderful charitable supply systems that can also work if governments will only get out of the way and let them work. All the food and oil pressures in the world will not work if local governments will not let them.

Have pity on those who think the answer to every problem is more government. They aren’t very bright, and no experience in the world will convince them otherwise.

Oil Hunger United Nations Biofuel

Rockets ala North Korea

2006-07-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

Now that North Korea has demonstrated, sort of, its expertise in rocketry by firing off a few scud-type missiles and an ICBM that flopped, I suppose we in the U.S. should be shaking in our boots.

North Korea wisely counted on American Media to blow everything out of proportion in an effort to find some way to blame President Bush for their progress. But somehow, the timing was all wrong. There is nothing like an Independence Day celebration to make Americans feel strong again. The North Korean and American Media efforts fizzled like the ICBM that lasted all of forty seconds.

Possibly there were a few Americans who recalled the former President’s give-away of American rocket secrets that made possible the North Korean efforts. But that President should not be blamed too much. If he hadn’t given away such secrets, the New York Times probably would have.

These days, the term “Arms Race” has an entirely new meaning. It now means the race of one group or another to give away secrets.

Media North Korea Rockets New York Times

President's Precedents

2006-06-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

Now that the Supreme Court has interfered in military matters (big time) with its decision yesterday on a certain prisoner held at Guantanamo, it may be worthwhile to look at what has happened in the past as presidents have directed their militaries.

President Abraham Lincoln is a case in point. During his war against the South, he organized military tribunals to handle trials of civilians in the North who disagreed with him. Not only did he take away their weapons, but he also suspended American citizen’s right of habeas corpus.

Some 13,000 northern or neutral state males were tried by military courts and tossed into prison for the flimsiest of reasons. In addition, the President destroyed about 200 printing presses. Yes, if he disagreed with a Northern newspaper, he sent General Burnside in with troops to physically mutilate that paper’s printing press.

The only reason the President did not destroy a large Chicago newspaper printing press was that the troops were met by a large mob milling around outside the newspaper’s building. Rather than shoot the citizens who were in the way, the troops withdrew and the paper continued to publish. It was the last such attack.

One should bear in mind that Congress can suspend habeas corpus, but not a President. Yet the Supreme court was remarkably quiet as all this went on.

Am I making this up? No, it is information found in most history books that were written by diligent researchers. But not much was made of these Presidential acts. Writers seemed to think the ends justified the means.

So what if a few dainty Americans get worked up because terrorists are not treated well enough? Can you imagine what would have happened to them in 1864? President Bush seems quite mellow compared to his predecessor.

Supreme Court Guantanamo Politics Abraham Lincoln General Burnside Civil War Habeas Corpus

Supreme Court Makes Treaty with Enemy

2006-06-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court has just concluded a treaty with terrorists. In its latest decision, larded with votes from its Liberal justices, the court has decided that terrorists should be included in the group of Geneva Convention nations. These nations are in the Convention by treaty. By including the terrorists in the Convention, the Supreme Court has conducted a treaty with them.

In this country even the president cannot make treaties. Treaties are the province of the U. S. Senate.

Not since Andrew Jackson has a President defied the Supreme Court. If the President and the Senate acted toward the Supreme Court as the Supreme Court acted toward the other two departments of government, there would be even more chaos.

The Senate needs to act quickly.

Supreme Court Terrorists Senate Politics

Oops! in Cause for Global Warming

2006-06-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

This morning my local newspaper carried the story that the temperature was warm and had not been so warm in four hundred years. I assumed that the subject was global temperature and not the temperature in Southern California, which seems to have been cooler this year.

With this story, the proponents of “global warming caused by the SUV in your driveway” crowd seem to have shot themselves in the foot. One may reasonably ask what caused the warming period four hundred years ago? Was it the SUV in the driveway of my ancestor in Renaissance Europe, or worse, in the driveway of my Native American ancestor in Virginia?

If the answer is neither, that these things happen naturally, some wag is likely to ask if the present warming is not also naturally caused and the battle will continue. But I will not ask that. I come from a family whose child didn’t just shoot himself in the foot, he blew off his big toe with a shotgun. For evidence see my book, Four on the Floor, which is kind of self-explanatory.

Global Warming science Politics News Media

Senators' Revenge

2006-05-31T22:01:00.000-07:00

So, why is the Senate so angry with the average citizen? Senators passed an abortion of an immigration bill that the American public plainly does not want.

Do they know we do not like it? Of course they do! The proof is that Senators who are up for election voted against the bill. The rest of the Senate thinks we are stupid and will forget all about this terrible bill by the time they are up for election.

It is time that we make a list of who voted for this terrible piece of legislation and we bring it out every time one of them runs. Democrat or Republican, each silly jerk that voted for the bill should pay the price for his idiocy.

What irritates me is that the bill would create a new type of protected class of person that would have more rights than we do—without the benefit of citizenship. It is very plain that our senators do not represent us. They represent illegal aliens--many of whom cross the border illegally, steal identities and do not pay taxes.

For their perfidy, these illegal aliens get protections we do not get.

The Senators must mad as hell at us, the people who follow their stupid laws and pay taxes.

But we don’t have to be angry with the senators. All we have to do is make sure they do not get re-elected.

Politics

Senate

Current Events Illegal Immigrants

Question 28

2006-05-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

This test question for middle school children is coming:

28) Name six homosexual inventors and tell what their contributions were.

All I know is what I read in the newspapers. Very recently there have been two stories about education. One was that many people could not find Israel or Iraq or even Mississippi on a map. The other story was that California’s legislators want to alter children's textbooks so that the sexual proclivities of historical persons could be identified (but only if they are gay).

Am I the only person in the world who sees the disconnect between these two realities? It is embarrassing to reside in a state where idiocy is so very rampant.

Given that a large number of high school students cannot read well (if at all), perhaps from this population come the ones who go into politics. Perhaps these people do not know that the sexual proclivities of people mentioned in textbooks are not as important as being able to read the textbooks or, (and this is connected) being able to find states on a map.

I suppose there is no requirement that legislators be literate. But perhaps voters should insist that they be able to set priorities (even if someone has to read the alternatives to them).

As for the answer to Question 28, I do not know. I do not care. I do not want to know, do you?

California education Homosexuality Politics

Promethian Propaganda

2006-04-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

As I prepare for another book about the WWII era and focus on activities at Caltech, I am amazed at what I am finding. In talking with widows and children of scientists who were there at the time plus a few others who are in their nineties and were also there, I am finding differences between what has been written and what is recalled. All the differences cannot be accidental or just the result of one’s “slant.” Some are factual.

Discovering these differences is what makes the job fun. They give another dimension to research.

I take particular exception to parts of the new biography of Julius Robert Oppenheimer called American Prometheus. Well written and no doubt well-researched, it contains curious omissions and is a bit too adoring to be an objective work.

I do not intend to write extensively about JRO, but I cannot help but take written notice of him as I interview those whose paths crossed his in the early 1940’s. It was a time of heroes and giants; JRO was at least one of the giants although not, perhaps, all that Promethian.

Prometheus Oppenheimer Caltech Atomic Bomb WWII writing

Rumors of Tumors

2006-04-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

In a recent Reuters news story, some eighty-five users of cell phones had malignant brain tumors and used cell phones “a lot.” What was the scientific quantity of use? “A lot.” Big science employed here! So a correlation was established by the writer, between cell phone use and malignant tumors. Two valuable rules of evidence were ignored.

One is that we all know that correlation is not cause and effect. We all drink water and we all die. Does water cause death? Only to those who drown in it.

The second rule is even simpler. It is exemplified by the story of people who lived near electric power poles whose children contracted cancer. Immediately, some people (and their lawyers) jumped to the conclusion that the electricity in the wires caused the cancer. What else did the children have in common? They played near the base of the poles where the power company had sprayed a herbicide to keep down the growth of weeds. It turned out that the herbicide was behind the cancer and not the electrons flowing through the wires.

Here is the second rule: One correlation does not rule out other correlations. In fairness, I can say that author of the study wrote that some “other agents” were ruled out (such as cigarettes). Probably not all of them. What they did not write about was the mechanism that causes human cells to become cancerous while in the presence of the electro-mechanical field of a cell phone. There doesn’t seem to be one.

Perhaps cell phones cause malignant tumors in some people, but probably not. The preponderance of evidence says not.

These kinds of “folk science” stories give good science a bad name. You'd think an educated Media would be more responsible. At least, more demanding.

science Cancer Medicine Cell phones Reuters Media

Faces of Heroism

2006-04-11T19:54:00.000-07:00

Today I talked to the widow of a long dead scientist. I explained that I was researching materials for a book She confided in me that her husband had worked on the first atomic bomb. She said she only found out after her husband had died, and she found out from another scientist. She did not even know her husband had gone to Los Alamos, New Mexico to the test site. It was all a deep, dark secret in those days.

The scientist told the widow how ashamed her husband had been for accomplishing his work so well.

The story of this scientist reminded me that heroism and patriotism take many forms. A person might be afraid in the face of the enemy, or might lose an arm in an accident during battle, or might have to kill a large number of the enemy to protect his comrades. Or, he might help make a new, terrible weapon. But he does his duty, even though he might not feel so good about it later. That is the nature of heroism. Often it leaves scars.

Atomic Bomb Culture Patriotism Science writing

Scientific Dogma

2006-04-07T22:37:00.000-07:00

Recently the Orange County(CA) Register had a science article on the loss of ice in Antarctica. A sub-heading said, “2 studies further support global warming caused by humans is adding to rising sea levels.”

The article presented evidence that ice was melting, but I looked in vain for evidence that the cause was human. There was none.

There probably is global warming. That the cause of global warming is human, appears to be an article of faith. Science has its dogma, too.

Science Global Warming Orange County Register

Moving Day and Failed Isms

2006-03-31T16:00:00.000-08:00

When one is 70 or so, he or she should be free from the need to move from one house to another. That freedom ought to be up there with four freedoms that President Roosevelt named in 1941: freedom from fear, hunger, and so on.

As I was deciding what to take with me a couple years ago for my move to Fullerton from Arcadia, California, I had to choose from among many books. Even worse, I had to decide where to throw out many books. It is getting hard to find places that will take them, ecologically sound places.

Now that I look back on the ordeal, I am impressed by the subject matter of books that I did not take. Not feeling an affinity for those topics indicates a certain freedom from the past.

Failed “isms” need not always be part of one’s psyche or one’s library.

For instance, many books on Communism are gone. I am not a Communist but an economist by education. I had to study Communism in college. Communism has proven itself to be a failure and is found only on college campuses these days (in the United States).

Likewise, books on existentialism are gone from my shelves. Existentialism was a “cute” philosophy of the past. My, how we longed for cuteness and novelty. Novels and philosophic writings used to be crammed full of existential thought. Histories were re-written to reveal existential roots of leaders. And in days when I was young, God was really, really dead—and for the last time, too. RIP.

My books on psychotherapy and its originator, Siggy Freud, are all gone. At one time I was a true believer. And why not? I was brought up with it. Contemporary literature was chock-full of the language of Freud. Movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s were full of deeply significant psychological talk. Actually, our movies were rather heavy-handed in their propaganda sieges. They would be embarrassingly obvious now. Psychologists became priests and even today are consulted by judges in criminal cases. They are asked to predict human behavior, but are not held accountable when they are proven wrong.

Biographers felt they had to psychoanalyze their subjects. They took a rough cut even though they did not live in the times of their subjects and even though they were totally unqualified as psychologists and even though many psychologists they knew were equally unqualified to practice. (Among my souvenirs is a cancelled check written to a psychologist who talked to my son. This practitioner had his license pulled, for his unethical work with a member of the Beach Boys musical group.)

Few words about Freud are heard these days. Psychologists are trying all kinds of other treatment techniques for obvious reasons. A study reported on in Scientific American showed that the three main therapy methods recorded some kind of improvement about one third of the time. It did not matter which method was used. Movie makers and novelists have given up on Freud. So have I. Perhaps, by this time Freud, is really, really, dead. RIP.

When I write about people I try to avoid psychological terms and any form of psychological analysis. I am happy to admit that I am not qualified to dabble in the black art of psychology.

What else is gone from my library? Not the really fine literature of our culture. I still have that. And I still have the essays of early economists. They were political thinkers as well as economists.

I threw out all the old computer books. But I kept bird books and well-written histories. Bartlett and Roget are still on my shelves. Many astronomy books have been surpassed by new discoveries and all my atlases also have been made obsolete. Dictionaries have changed, but I still have a few computer programming books. I occasionally write a program just to see if I can still do it.

And I have an old bible or two. An occasional death of the Creator has not discouraged me.

At the last count, two thirds of my personal library is gone. Dusty, faithful old friends are being reprocessed somewhere into, I hope, new books so they can spread a better truth than I have known—truth that can last more than a few years. And I hope they can avoid cuteness.

Culture Books Communism existentialism psychotherapy Freud

The Citibank Saga Continues

2006-03-27T22:09:00.000-08:00

In my last post to this blog I reported on the UPS (Brown) situation that compounded my Citibank ATM card problems.

Citibank arbitrarily shut off my ATM card and shut me out of computer access to my bank account. I have heard that I was only one out of many more that this happened to . When I told Citibank that the new card they sent my was lost in the bowels of UPS somewhere, and in spite of what was reported I did not receive it or sign for it. So they sent another one to my local branch bank.

My local branch told me the card had arrived, so I went see them and pick up the card. I was told that the card was ready to go and already had my pin number included.

But when the teller at the ban tried to activate the card, it would not work. She had a bad cold and coughed a lot and was not feeling well. After many attempts, she had me call Citibank on the bank’s phone. They had a direct line to Calcutta. Either that or the guy on the other end of the line was doing a perfect imitation of the actor Ben Kingsley in the movie, Ghandi.

Ghandi could not activate my card, either. He worked and worked on it some 10,000 miles away, interrupting the process to talk to his supervisor a couple of times and then pronounced the job as completed. He wished me a nice day and ended the conversation. I asked the teller to test his handiwork. She could not get the card to work.

The teller and I spent some five minutes on my replacement card. This required many applications of her finger to a pad that was checking her fingerprint. That check was unreliable as well. But she finally pronounced the job as done. I went outside the bank to its ATM window and fearfully placed the card in its slot.

It worked! Despite all UPS and Citibank could do, I actually possessed an ATM card that worked.

Then I had to go home and call a special telephone number that would gain me access to my bank account via the Internet. It was back to India again, only this time with a female Ben Kingsley who had a high voice and spoke very fast. Ms Ghandi and I were able, after a long time to break the code so that I could access my own bank account.

All was in order with my finances. And I am developing some fluency with Hindi.

UPS Shipping Citibank Culture

What Can Brown Do To You, Today?

2006-03-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

Last week, Citibank suddenly tied up my ATM card and didn't let me know. So I went into the closest bank and inquired about it. They talked to supervisors and finally told me I would have to call my branch bank in Arcadia. So I called them on an 800 number, probably in Calcutta. There they switched me off to a supervisor. She told me my card was somehow involved in a fraud. A friend later told me that he saw in the newspaper and on TV that Citibank had screwed up a lot of accounts with a stupid move and that I was one of the losers. I don’t know, yet.

I tried to get into my bank account on the Internet but they had blocked that, too. So I didn't know how much money I was missing, if any.

Citibank offered to send out a card by UPS and that I should be at home all day to get it on Friday. Nothing happened on Friday so I called them the following Monday. They said their records showed UPS delivered the card and that I had signed for it. I said FRAUD and they better get on it.

Citibank offered to get a card to my local bank on Wednesday. But it would have another number. I said fine and then called UPS (good ole Brown). The guy I talked to had an attitude. He said in his arrogant way that their records showed the card was delivered somewhere on Thursday, not Friday, and picked back up that evening. It looked to him that it had been delivered to the wrong house. He added that the driver had put my name on the delivery slip. He did not know where the card was but at least it had the right address on it. He told me to tell Citibank to put a tracer on it.

I knew that the card was dead and that no one had tried to activate it. So I told the Brown guy what I was going to do--I was not going to tell Citibank and I was going to write about them in my latest blog on the Internet. And that he could do the tracing himself, if he wanted to. He ordered me to have a nice day.

Should we beware the military-industrial complex? No, the banking-shipping complex.

The saga continues.

UPS Shipping Citibank Culture

Driving Miss Economy

2006-03-14T22:05:00.000-08:00

Ask most people what is driving the economy and they will guess that it is the computer revolution. It seems that every day there is some new invention or way of handling information that retires an old device and makes necessary a new, expensive device. VoIP and MP3s are examples of newer devices.

But there is another economic mover and shaker that lurks in the background. Our nation’s inventory of houses is maturing. We don’t throw houses away like we do old computers. We upgrade them. Home Depot and Lowes-type stores are not popular just because they are fast-moving retailers. They are popular because they are filling a need caused by the aging of our nation’s houses.

Thanks to standardization of construction dimensions (2X4 construction is about the same in every state and door heights are usually the same), an innovation for repair or upgrading in New York is often equally useful in Texas. In other words, it pays to innovate because there is a large volume of potential customers. It seems that every week, my local home store offers a new tool or plumbing or electrical or bracket or insulation device that is easily handled by the average do-it-yourselfer. This continuous upgrading for the upgraders is very good for our economy. Because of the continuous revolution in electronics, people have jobs and the money to upgrade their homes.

If that weren’t enough, specialists are springing up with new products for those jobs where a do-it-yourselfer, can’t. Some companies will replace all the plumbing in your house; others will replace all your windows and doors. They do their jobs quickly and efficiently and that is all they do. Specialization often results in lower prices. Generally the replacements are better and use less energy. This activity is sparking the economy, too.

Our revolution in communication allows new ideas to flow quickly and easily around the country and the world. It allows a kind of marketing in which people read about a new product and then demand it from their local retailer.

If all this progress keeps up we may be able to afford an extra gallon of gasoline.

Economics culture business Do-it-yourself Housing

Bonds Between China and the USA

2006-03-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

Recently I heard someone on radio say that the Chinese are financing America’s debt and that we were in trouble if they suddenly quit doing it. The idea was that a parent was going to “cut us off” without a cent. But the Chinese are not doing us a favor as a fond parent might. They are making an investment in the most business-like sense. It pays for them to invest in America’s bonds.

When a person says China is financing our debt, he is really saying that the Chinese bought a great deal of the bonds issued by the American government. The Chinese made an investment. If they “suddenly quit” financing our debt, how will they do it? One of two ways, maybe a bit of both. 1), China will sell some existing bonds, and 2), China will hold other bonds to maturity but will not buy more when those bonds mature.

In the first case, the Chinese will sell their bonds to someone else, just as they would any other investment. They are unwilling to take a loss--they made the investment in America for safety and a likely return on their investment. If they dump a lot of bonds at once they face a drop in the price of those bonds. Also, when they sell their bonds they will have to invest in some other government’s bonds. Lots luck to them.

America, with all its Chinese-owned bonds suddenly dumped on the market, will see lower priced bonds which means a higher interest rate in the future. However, there will be little immediate impact. Someone will buy the bonds and America will not be involved in the transaction.

In the second case (when China suddenly stops financing America’s debt) as Chinese-owned bonds mature China will buy no more of them. It will invest somewhere else. Again, lots of luck. China will buy another nation’s bonds, out-bidding someone else and that other person or nation will buy America’s bonds.

In order to sell a new issue of bonds, America may have to raise interest rates. In the today’s world, which seems to be awash in capital, the rise in interest rates will not be pleasant but will not be overwhelmingly large, either.

So do economists quake at the thought of China suddenly refusing to “finance America’s debt”? None that I know of, for the reasons given. And, if they are old enough they recall a time twenty years ago when people were afraid that Japan would suddenly refuse to finance America’s debt. Today’s pronouncement about our debt has a familiar sound and when decoded, it means “go back to school and take an economics class.”

economics government politics Current Affairs News Media

Teachers and Personal Opinions

2006-03-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, as I was passing the doorway to a science classroom, a seventh grader said, “Hello, Mr. Fiske, you old fart.”

I chuckled inside, but managed a stern face and said, “Come on, Bobby, let’s go to the office.” I wasn’t Bobby’s teacher at the moment, but I took charge of him anyway and marched him to the school office. There, I filled out a referral slip, on which I wrote, “Bobby called me, in front of about 20 students, ‘An old fart.’ While he may be right, I thought his choice of words was inappropriate for Dana Middle School.”

Bobby got a detention and was told to apologize. When he did I broke a rule and put my arm around him, saying “Bobby, I don’t mind what you said. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Just don’t say words like that in front of other students.” We became good friends after that. I am sure he did not change his opinion. But the office personnel had a lot of fun with the referral.

Having taught graduate and undergraduate students in college and all grades from six through twelve in public schools, I have loads of experience with political and other opinions in the classroom. My inner person guided me with a sense of fair play. That is, if I expressed an opinion, I gave the opposite view as well. No one knew how I voted in elections.

That is why I (and other teachers should be) was so offended by the actions of one Jay Bennish of the Overland High School in the Denver, Colorado area. In his lectures to tenth graders, this teacher expressed a great deal of anti-Bush, anti-U.S.A. venom with no opportunity for rebuttal, according to tapes made in his classroom. The remarks appeared to be off-topic as well as ‘off the wall.’ There was no fair play involved.

It is my opinion (others may disagree) that the American tradition allows for dissent and for both sides of an argument to be presented, even at the tenth grade level. This is especially important in America’s public school system.

Mr. Bennish’s lawyer argued on a TV news program that the teacher had the right of free speech. Not so. What if Mr. Bennish used his 55 minutes with students to preach the Gospel? He would find himself out of the school district on his ear. And he should be. He is a geography teacher.

So, okay, I was brought up in the Louisville, KY school district where teachers utilized fair play every day. Maybe other school districts are not so inclined. But I suspect that fair-minded people can be found everywhere.

Maybe I am just an idealist.

Teachers culture
education Politics Kentucky Louisville

Bugging the CIA

2006-03-02T21:17:00.000-08:00

In the past I have done some very special research for my books. By “special “ I mean to say research that cannot be found by the average person. I required help from the CIA and the FBI.

Under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) a researcher can find all kind of useful information. For instance, I had a cousin who traipsed all over Europe after WWII, sometimes in Iron Curtain countries, for fun and profit. He owned several companies that dealt with the Federal Government, too. So I was sure the FBI had a file on him. The CIA, too. But I was more interested in his domestic activities, so I did not ask the CIA for information.

At first, the FBI only wanted proof that my subject was really dead. So I had to round up an obituary from 1967. And then the ___ hit the fan.

It just so happened that when I asked for information on my cousin, the Clinton Administration was found to have 900 private FBI files of Republican opponents and a big, embarrassing stink ensued. The FBI became very skittish about releasing information. They stalled and stalled. But after a couple of years I got a few redacted papers. They concerned mostly Jimmy Hoffa, the late (and still missing) president of the Teamsters. It seems the FBI was investigating my cousin’s companies to see if the Teamsters had been shaking down them down. The Teamsters were clean.

Well, now I am investigating another person, not a cousin, who may have been involved in “Operation Paperclip,” right after WWII. This was not a popular Truman program that allowed the U.S. to seize German papers, equipment, and scientists involved in rocket science and in atomic energy projects. If the scientists were Nazis, then their records were cleaned up. The purpose was a) to help the U.S. and b) to keep the information and scientists out of Russian hands.

On paper, my subject reported to Dr. Carl David Anderson of CalTech. Anderson was the man who turned down control of the Manhattan Project in favor of his friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer. In reality, my subject reported directly to President Roosevelt first and then to President Truman. He was a friendly spy among the presidents’ advisors.

I have requested information by FAX from both the FBI and the CIA. Fortunately, my subject’s widow is alive and alert, and she is quite anxious to find out what her husband was really up to during years as WWII wound down and the Cold War sprang up. He was never allowed to tell her.

And yes, the FBI has responded by asking for proof of the death of my subject. They will not accept their own government’s Social Security Death Index as proof of death. Maybe they do not trust the government.

Science writing Government Freedom of Information Act CalTech Operation Paperclip FBI CIA

POW in the War Between the Sexes

2006-02-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

Having grown up with two mean older brothers and no sisters or close female first cousins, I was brought up with a very scant knowledge of girls and women. But I was smart from the beginning; I didn’t understand females and admitted it. Despite my groveling and deference I grew up suffering at their hands. Women can detect even the slightest fear and will take advantage of any male who shows it.

Women teachers seemed to single me out for disapproval. No matter how hard I tried to please them, they came at me with a look of extreme displeasure, not unlike Representative Nancy Pelosi, who looks like the “before” picture in an ad for hemorrhoid sufferers.

In industry the person who caused me the most trouble was a woman named Mary Ann Something. She was bright, a very good manager and a sharp union steward, while I represented management. I could have a terrible day, but it always got worse when Mary Ann appeared in my office. I once tried to enlist Mary Ann in the ranks of management (we could have used a higher level of manager) but she would not sell out her Labor ideals and bore down even harder on me. No good deed goes unpunished.

In my personal life I have had two wives, a daughter, a step-daughter, a daughter-in-law and several granddaughters but my understanding of females has not improved because of them.

I have even taught in public school, where I often told my charges that women can do anything but play left tackle for the Detroit Lions and most men can’t do that, either. And I meant it. I wanted to be on record as pro-female when they took over the world. But my pretty students took this comment as mere groveling and wrote beside my name in their book of executions, “head of the line.”

My only saving grace is that I have a very good talent for fixing things. I would be pushing up daisies right now, if it were not for the day, early in my substitute teaching career, when a seventh grade girl I didn’t know brought me a handful of parts to her eyeglasses. It was during a test and she was losing time, so I quickly reached into my briefcase and bought out a tiny screwdriver and some very small screws. I had her glasses put back together again in less than a minute. She told other girls and my life was spared from that moment on.

There were several widows on my block and I was allowed to help them with electrical problems and plumbing disasters. That way I managed to continue in not good but tolerable standing with the female community. But it took lots of work to stay at that level.

The Bible says I came into this world with nothing. Nothing, that is, but a minus quantity of points with the opposite sex, and I have been trying to break even all my life. Like Sisyphus with his task of rolling a huge rock up a hill, I have been given the task of understanding women and failed every day.

culture Life Women War between the sexes sisyphus Humor

Rocket Science Secrets

2006-02-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

Nearly all of them are dead now. So I guess I can say a little about them and the adventures they described. I learned about them in a church, of all places. The church sponsored an autobiographical writer’s club and I was asked to join. Elderly ladies outnumbered us men, and their stories were no less interesting because they were women. However, it was stories about their families that caught my attention. Who could have expected to hear about the rocket science and its secrets that bound three of the ladies?

Over a period of years with this group I learned some of the secrets and even a tale of horror. For reasons I cannot tell, I was asked not to reveal their names. I understand why, but for the most part they are all gone now, and I can tell a little of what I learned.

The first story was one of horror and destitution. A German lady in the group, Heidi, revealed her story. She was raised in Transylvania, Romania as part of a German village with an almost ideal existence until WWII. Her uncle was a rocket scientist and professor whom I will call Hermann Schmidt. He was not a Nazi but his student Werner Von Braun, was. The little family managed to get through the War with deprivation, but they got through somehow. Then at the end, Russians came through, setting up a Communist government. The leaders of this government dispossessed Heidi’s family. The Russians took all German children of working age with them into Russia as virtual slaves to work on Russian farms. Heidi, a pretty girl then, worked a year or so in Russia and escaped first to East Germany and then to West Germany. Later, she went to Canada and ventured into the United States. Even now, Heidi is trying to locate the rest of her family in Europe.

The second story concerns a widow whose husband died just before I became a member of the writer’s group. A. L. (Bill) Belken is the name I have given him. He traveled as a civilian but had a high military status. Over a period of years I learned that he had worked directly for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman in Europe. I have seen personal commendations from those presidents for the work that Bill did, but I do not know what he did. The libraries of these presidents are silent on the subject. The National Archive says it has never heard of him.

All I could find from his widow was that he traveled extensively in Europe during and after WWII. Oh, there was one thing: when the P-38 plane was developed, it shook drastically. The two engines drove it were shaking the plane apart. Bill, with some kind of connection to Cal Tech, was asked to take a look at the problem. He suggested that the engineers reverse the rotation of one of the engines. That solved the problem and the P-38 was a great offensive weapon during the war.

I also learned that Bill was interested in JATO, or Jet Assisted Take Off of airplanes, which put him solidly in the rocket science camp. That was a short program, but rockets were just beginning to come into their own. Was Bill also involved in “Operation Paperclip?” It is quite possible. Very little is said about that operation, even today. But I can say that this operation, begun under President Truman, was one in which German rocket scientists and their laboratories were collected by Western Allies before the Russians could get to them. If the scientists were also Nazis, then their records were cleaned up. Perhaps little is known about Bill because of his involvement in that program. It was not a popular one.

Finally, there is another story. A wife in the writer’s group had a husband who was a simple MD and had been one during WWII. I will call him Dr. Mike Moriarity, because he has to have a name. Mike was part of America’s space program. The secret is that he was present at all Russian space program events during the 1960’s. He was a good friend of Yuri Gagarin and other Russian space people. He was an invited guest at each event. I personally have seen photos of Mike and Yuri together. Mike’s wife told us and later Mike agreed as he attended our meetings, that he would suddenly disappear from the U.S. No one knew where he was. Well, almost no one knew. Certainly not his family. But the Russians knew. Mike was with them.

When Mike would return from one of his clandestine trips, he was interviewed by not one but two U. S. intelligence agencies. The Russians had to know that he was being interviewed. And Mike was not allowed to tell one agency what he had told the other. That is, each agency had to ask its own questions; they did not share a common report or interview Mike at the same time.

Now, if the U. S. had a representative at Russian space flights, was there reciprocity such that the Russians had a representative to watch our space flights? Very likely.

Eventually Mike phased out of the Space program but all that he did was kept secret. Even today, although Mike and his wife are dead, almost no one talks about his exploits in the space program. Most don’t know. But there are good reasons for not using his real name even as I write this.

Looking at this group of elderly writers, no one could have detected the common thread among their stories. They certainly did not recognize the thread until I pointed it out to them.

Rocket Science NASA Technology Yuri Gagarin Cal Tech Harry S Truman Werner Von Braun P-38 Transylvania Operation Paperclip

Remarkable Cure for Headaches

2006-02-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

If you knew me, you would never guess that I am, or was, a frequent victim of headaches. These were not the “My headache is gone!” run-of-the-mill type headaches, either. These were blinding, splitting, go to bed without any dinner and no TV headaches.
One afternoon, while in the early throes of one of these killer aches, I decided to take a walk and get away from it all. Living in upper San Dimas, CA at the time, I hiked to the closest trail I could find that led into the mountains. It wasn’t long before a path took me around the side of a hill among the trees and away from all the noise of city life.
Suddenly I found myself alone. There was no noise except for the chirping of a mocking bird and the cawing of a crow. Maybe a bee was zipping from flower to flower. The silence was stunning. Also stunning was the pile in front of me that had been left by horse which had recently gone on ahead. I was, after all, on a bridle path.
I stopped for some reason and took it all in, looking for a way to step around the pile, so I could continue up the hillside. It was then that I experienced an olfactory hallucination! I do not know to this day how it happened, but suddenly I was transported back to my youth when I would leave the big city and visit a farm for a few days. The farmer had lots of horses. It was Bluegrass country, you see. Those were happy times when the only responsibility I had was to clean my shoes and report for meals on time.
Unfortunately, my mind didn’t spend much time in that place. The forlorn cry of a hawk wheeling overhead snapped me back to reality. When it did, I realized my headache had fled to other places. I was healed! Well, not permanently, but for the afternoon. I found that as headaches occurred in the succeeding months I could dispel them by walking up into the hills until I found another fresh pile. It had to be fresh green stuff, mind you. The brown material with a crust on it would not work. Eventually, I was able to go for weeks without a headache and I can now report that I have not had a really bad one for years. Talk about a miracle drug!
Since that time I have offered this miracle cure to others. It has been successfully used against three headache sufferers, one hernia and a hangnail. I am sure it would help most people.
I have offered this miracle compound to people in a local hospital, but my kindness was refused. You would be amazed at the numbers of people who don’t want to get well. But I am sure most readers are not like them.
Probably, since most people live so far from a race track, they cannot get their own supply of this nostrum. I am prepared to ship a one pound box without delay. There is a modest cost, of course. But I offer a warning: use it right away. The shelf life of this curative is very short.
Please let me know of your needs; I have connections at Santa Anita Race Track. The regular spring season is about over and it will not be until the fall when a fresh supply will return to Arcadia.

Humor Medicine Health and wellness Horse Racing