Month: July 2020

Have you ever wondered about where you came from?

Sure, most of us know who our parents are/were, as well as our grandparents, etc. We know these things because we were told the family tale by our parents and other members of the family when we were growing up. We had no reason to doubt the narrative, so we accepted it at face value.

However, sometimes the recounting is self-serving, i.e. to protect some family secret, hide some shameful episode, ignore obvious irregularities, and so forth. I’ve never understood what’s gained by covering something up, because the truth will eventually surface. And, usually, it’s better when one knows all the facts: less resentment, more understanding, and a feeling of belonging, because you’re now privy to the “secrets”.

My wife Charlie has struggled with the demon of not being privy to the real story of her birth. She grew up in a family of six children, and it was obvious to her that she (the oldest) was different in many ways from her five siblings. She knew this all of her life, but no one in the family would clue her in to the real story. Her parents and their siblings took the truth to the grave, refusing to rat out the other conspirators.

After her parents died, she and I did some research and have come up with a reasonable guess as to what happened. It appears that her mother got pregnant while unmarried, the scandal was hidden by the staunch Catholic family, an admirer stepped up to make an honest woman out of Charlie’s mom, and everyone involved (the new parents, their parents, and her Mom’s siblings) all agreed to hide the truth. This was back in the mid-1940’s: it was much different then, when pregnancy while unmarried was considered a disgrace. Nowadays, as the saying goes, “shit happens”, then you move on.

So, Charlie never met her biologic father and never learned anything about him, either. She has a variety of health issues that are probably genetic, i.e. from her father’s DNA contribution. That missing information has tormented her. And there’s the fact that several of siblings don’t seem to care that she was deprived of the truth: that’s caused a lot of resentment which she will probably take to the grave.

We’ve got a neighbor Kenny Juber who had the same empty feeling for most of his life: there was something missing in the “official” family lineage story. Anyway, he’s a single, energetic guy with time on his hands and he decided a few years ago to start an Ancestry.com investigation on his lineage. Low and behold, he found out that he had a bunch of half-brothers and half-sisters back in New York state. It turned out that his Dad wasn’t actually his biological father, and that the sperm donor was a very prolific salesman/lothario in the community, a veritable Johnny Appleseed. He’d hooked up with Kenny’s mom when Daddy was away at work.

When my friend traced back to all those half-brothers and half-sisters he found out that several of them had musical talent like he does. Kenny performs in local musical theater and is also a Karaoke legend around here. It turned out that one of his half-sisters has performed on The Grand Ol Opry! He’s now met all of his lost siblings on the other side of the continent, most of them look like him, and they’ve totally accepted him. It’s pretty cool.

Last night Charlie and I were watching “American Pickers” on TV. The junk pickers were at the ranch of some 90-year-old ex-cowboy/Hollywood stuntman who had a lot of memorabilia from his life. One such item was an elaborate tassled jacket that was given to him by an old friend/actor named Duncan Reynaldo. That rang a bell with me because, back in the 1950’s, Reynaldo had been the lead character in the beloved TV series “The Cisco Kid”.

Not only had I watched it as a child but, according to my Dad, who was a pretty straight-shooter, the co-star Leo Carrillo (who played sidekick “Pancho”) was a distant relative of mine.

That seemed hard to believe at the time because Mr. Carrillo was Hispanic, and my parents’ lineage was supposedly Scotch-Irish and English. I never met my Dad’s father (Bill) and mother (Lila) because they were run over by a train (at a railroad crossing) before I was born.

I know very little about my grandfather Bill Manning except that he was a railroad man, a neat and tidy guy, and a fairly strict father who believed in corporal punishment.

I am pretty much in the dark as far as my paternal grandmother Lila is concerned. According to my mother, she was a very loving lady whom my Mom worked with at a box factory during World War II and who introduced my Mom (Barbara) to her son Richard. My Mom adored her friend/eventual mother-in-law, whose maiden name was Lila Mae Enz.

The Enz branch of the family had a very interesting history.

The Enz’s were all railroad men going back several generations. My Dad’s uncle Les (Lila Mae’s brother) was an AT&SF railroad engineer at the time I got to know him (in the 1950’s). He was, then, the regular “driver” of the AT&SF City of Las Vegas (L.A. to Vegas) run.

Our Manning family grew up in the city of Monterey Park in Southern California which is bordered on the north by the city of Alhambra. That latter city is where my Dad grew up before WWII and where I later went to high school (Mark Keppel H.S.). The Enz’s (my grandmother’s side of the family) had homes in that area and in adjacent South San Gabriel, and my Dad spent a lot of his youth there goofing around with his uncles and cousins.

The Enz family connection with the Santa Fe Railroad came in handy during the Depression, when the Enz and Manning families always had work with the AT&SF. My father told me that he got a job as a teenager which required him to load/unload boxcars at a hot, dusty railroad hub in the desert called Las Vegas. This was back in the 1930’s: it was a hellhole, then, without casinos, showgirls, or the Mob.

My father also told me about his “interview” for the railroad job. He was taken into Santa Fe headquarters down in Los Angeles by his Dad and one of the Enz clan who hooked him up with a guy (he implied that it was another Enz) who was in charge of hiring. It was more of an introduction than a job interview, and he was given a job on the spot.

Later in life, in the early 1960’s, the Manning and Enz families had beachside vacation homes together in Mexico near Ensenada. My great Uncle Les Enz loved to fish and he taught me the basics. One of his brothers was at that time a Border Patrol officer working at Tijuana, and he would bring my brother Terry and I confiscated fireworks that we could ignite on the beach. I met another Enz brother (Irv) later in life. He was retired then and dabbling in real estate up in Anza, where he owned an old Western museum.

My Dad later explained the strong Enz connection to the Santa Fe Railroad.

It began with an Old West frontiersman named Richens Lacey Wootton. For most of his adult life he was known as “Uncle Dick”.

Wootton was a contemporary of famous guys like Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Old Bill Williams and William Bent, all of them early trappers, guides, and explorers up in the Rocky Mountains. Uncle Dick had a lot of adventures in his life like trapping, guiding, hunting buffalo, herding cattle, freighting, trading, fighting Indians, and such. He was a well-known “mountain man”of the time.

Wootton was asked by John Fremont in 1848 to lead a party of men through the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Winter. He declined, so the job went to Old Bill Williams…who died as a result of the ordeal.

Supposedly, Wootton was one of the first ranchers to experiment with breeding Buffalo and cattle (i.e “beefalo”), built the first commercial building in Denver, and later signed the incorporation papers when that town became a city.

He had a big life: you can Google him.

In his waning years Uncle Dick Wootton settled in the Raton Pass area of New Mexico where, in 1866, he built a road (on an easement that he acquired from the Maxwell Land Grant) through a rugged mountain pass with the help of a local Indian tribe. Wooton then set up a toll booth on his property where he collected fees from cowboys who were driving cattle from the south up to Denver. It was a profitable venture for him.

Eventually the Santa Fe Railroad got the idea to shorten their cattle-hauling line by about a thousand miles by building a tunnel and laying some track through the Raton Pass. In the 1870’s, they offered Wootton $50,000 ($1.2 million in today’s money) for his easement.

The aging, almost blind Uncle Dick turned down that offer, but instead countered with a sweet deal for the AT&SF: they could have the easement for free with the proviso that they would provide Mrs. Wootton (his much younger 5^th wife) with groceries and a railroad pass…for the rest of her life. The AT&SF happily took the deal, and supported Mrs. Wootton for 30 years after Uncle Dick’s passing in 1893.

That project through the Raton Pass completed the AT&SF’s rail connection from Kansas City all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada.

During his life Uncle Dick Wootton sired twenty children.

Because Manning/Enz family lore is so specific about Mr. Wootton, and the Enz family ongoing connection with the Santa Fe Railroad, it is my guess that my paternal grandmother, Lila Mae Enz, was a descendent of one of Uncle Dick’s many daughters.

(That, plus the fact that my grandmother’s brother Les Enz was the spitting image of Uncle Dick Wootton, when compared to an image featured his biography, which was produced by the University of Nebraska Press.)

I was told in my younger days by my Dad that the Enz family has a Basque (Spanish) heritage.

That could be the connection with California and the early Spanish/Mexican Californios.

In the mid-1800’s, Uncle Dick Wootton led a party of men from New Mexico to the California gold fields with a huge herd of sheep to feed hungry Gold Rush miners. Wootton’s group left New Mexico with 8,000 sheep and arrived with 7,800, which is no small feat, considering that they had to cross the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Basques and sheep husbandry are almost synonymous. Where there are sheep, there are Basques. Thus, it is very likely that Uncle Dick Wootton, who did not raise sheep, would have guided Basque men and their herd of 8,000 sheep out to California.

I’d bet my bippy that one of those Basque men (with an Enz surname) hooked up with one of Wootton’s twenty daughters. That would explain the Wooton/Enz connection and the continuing relationship with the Santa Fe Railroad.

So, back to old Leo Carrillo. How does he fit into this mystery?

My Dad told me that when he was a young boy he was taken down to a “big Spanish-styled mansion in Los Angeles” where he was introduced to a “matriarch” of a big family that was connected somehow to his mother’s side of the family (the Enz’s).

When my Dad related this incident to me later in his life, he believed that the matriarch he met (in the 1930’s) was involved with the “Dominguez Rancho”.

But, why would this lady want to be introduced to my Dad?

Jose Dominguez was a Spanish soldier in the 1769 Gaspar de Portola expedition from San Diego all the way up to the Monterey Bay. On that expedition ordered by the Spanish crown to colonize California del Norte, Franciscan friar Junipero Serra identified sites for what eventually became the California mission system. The route that the explorers followed became the historic Camino Real and, later, Highway 101.

In recognition of his service to the Spanish crown, in 1784, King Carlos III granted about 75,000 acres to Jose Dominguez. That land grant, called Rancho San Pedro, was the very first Spanish land grant in California. The original Rancho encompassed all of what is now Los Angeles Harbor, the Signal Hill oil fields, the Cal State University at Dominguez Hills campus, Palos Verdes, Marina del Rey, and the Los Angeles International Airport.

Today, that acreage would be worth a jillion dollars .

Manuel Dominguez, the grandson of Jose Dominguez, and who once was the Alcalde (Mayor) of Los Angeles, died in 1882. He was at that time the patriarch of the Dominguez clan. Since he had no male heirs, the remaining 46,000 acres of Dominguez rancho lands were partitioned among his six daughters, of which three had children.

Given the time frame that my Dad described (i.e. having met the “matriarch” when he was a young boy), at a Spanish-styled mansion in Los Angeles (the Dominguez Rancho Adobe?), I’m guessing that the lady he met was the daughter of one of those three siblings who inherited most of what survived of the Dominguez land grant in 1882.

By the mid-1930’s, the Dominguez legacy was continued through the Carson, Del Amo, and Watson families, which were the lineages of three of the six Dominguez heirs.

I’m guessing that the Enz family was somehow connected to one of those three families by marriage. Otherwise, why would my Dad (who was 50 percent Enz) be introduced to the family matriarch?

So, where does the actor Leo Carrillo, supposedly a distant relative of mine, fit in?

I think he was related to the Dominguez clan in some lineage that included an Enz relation.

Leo Carrillo’s great-great grandfather Jose Raimundo Carrillo was a soldier in that same 1769 Gaspar de Portola expedition, along with Jose Dominguez. So, senors Carrillo and Dominguez were fraternal brothers, of a sort. In addition, they both knew Father Junipero Serra from the expedition. In fact, Father Serra performed the marriage ceremony of Don Jose Raimundo and Tomasa Ignacia Lugo in 1781. So, Father Junipero Serra was part of the fraternity, as well.

The Carrillos, the Dominguez’s, and Father Junipero Serra would all play a big part in the early history of California.

Leo Carrillo’s great grandfather was Carlos Antonio Carrillo, who was governor of Alta California (which encompassed what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arizona) from 1837 to 1838.

He was also, like Dominguez, a Spanish land grant recipient, once owning Santa Rosa Island in the Channel Islands (near Santa Barbara).

Carlos’ great uncle, Jose Antonio Carrillo, was a three-time mayor of Los Angeles and was twice married to different sisters of Pio Pico, who was the last Governor of Alta California in 1846.

It is highly likely that the rich and famous, old-line Dominguez and Carillo families, who were early California royalty and had by the mid-1800’s known each other for at least eighty years, were connected by marriage, which was the fashion in the Spanish culture (and in Old California).

In the middle of this golden era of Old California history, Uncle Dick Wooton and his team of Basque sheepherders brought a herd of 7,800 sheep into the Bay Area to feed hungry 49’ers.

I’m just speculating here, based upon the clues given me by my Dad, of course, but I think that one of those Basque sheepherders, who had an Enz surname (possibly the brother an Enz who had married one of Uncle Dick Wooton’s twenty daughters) somehow managed to find a Hispanic bride in the extended Dominguez family.

That would explain my father’s reference to distant relative Leo Carrillo and to the old matriarch that he met in the 1930’s.

And, why she might want to meet young Richard Manning.

It’s a theory, as good an explanation as I can imagine.

It could even be true.

The dogs have settled into their Summer routines here in Mesquite, Nevada.

Booger, who is going on 13 years old, keeps a low profile. She begs a little, naps a lot, plays a few minutes a day with the other dogs, and generally spends most of the night sleeping on a couch in the living room. Our bed has become too crowded for her; she likes to stretch out and snore and doesn’t like to be disturbed.

Booger can’t see things so well and her back legs are beginning to fail her, particularly when she tries to fetch a ball or jump up onto a couch. However she’s still interested in life and will haul ass to the front door if a deliveryman or neighbor rings the bell.

About half the time she will not eat all of her food. We don’t push her; she’s earned the right to live the way she wants to. She will, however, eat any and all human food scraps presented to her. She is not, and has never been, stupid.

She’s the Alpha dog, the Leader of the Pack.

Baby will be 3 years old in a few months. She is super-energetic, will play ball or tug-a-rope whenever the opportunity presents itself, is an attention hog, and has assumed JayJay’s duties as a Sous Chef in the kitchen. She follows me everywhere, particularly when she sniffs food in the air.

Although Baby started out slow, she has become an avid car rider. We can’t do much of it right now because of the heat. As a matter of fact, we also can’t do much walking in the neighborhood, which is one of her favorite things. Absent walks, she spends a bunch of her day going in and out of the doogie door, looking for things to do in the backyard.

There could be intruders…

We are so proud of the way that Baby has become a surrogate mother to our new puppy BonBon. She’s quite gentle with her and plays with her constantly.

Baby loves Charlie and insists on cuddling with her at night and in the morning in our bed. She will not start her day until Charlie gets up. So, often, I am up at 5:30 a.m. to give Bonnie a potty break and feed her, while Baby stays in bed and gets another hour or so of shut eye.

Baby has turned out to be a cool dog with a great disposition.

Our little BonBon (i.e. Bonnie) is growing. She weighed 4.2 pounds at nine weeks when we got her and she now tallies just under 7 pounds at 14 weeks of age. She’s still small enough that she can simply walk through our wrought iron fence in the backyard, so we must be with her at all times. Thank goodness that she hasn’t yet been able to manage the doggie door!

Bonnie and Baby play together most of the day when they aren’t napping. They are BFFs, for sure, and its very touching to watch Bonnie munching on Baby’s ears and muzzle while they wrestle on the carpet or couch.

Although she is tiny right now, Bonnie is no pushover or wallflower: she dives right into any fray between Booger and Baby, holds her own, and will go after one of them if she feels that she’s been dissed. She’s got spunk in spades.

Bonnie sleeps with us on our bed at night. Most of the time she’s right up against my shoulder. Sometimes she curls up with Baby for a nap on the couch.

During the daytime Bonnie pees about every hour and poos about every two hours. However, she sleeps typically from 10 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. without a bathroom break! We love it.

House-training is spotty at this point. Bonnie knows where she is supposed to pee and poo (i.e. outside, preferably on the grass) but she can’t use the doggie door and has several “accidents” a day. We walk around the house with eyes to the floor so that we don’t slip on pee or trip over something.

Unless I catch her in the act I don’t punish the little dog. I am usually alerted to accidents by the other two dogs who will make themselves scarce, or their ears will be pinned to their skulls, or they will come up to me and start licking my legs. Then I know that someone named BonBon has done the deed somewhere.

Speaking of training, my wife is training Bonnie to beg like Booger and Baby.

The scorching Summer climate in Mesquite is rough on Boston Terriers because they’re short muzzled which causes them to naturally breathe poorly. Then, the air is super hot and dry. And, to top it off, the streets, sidewalks, pavers, and even the artificial grass is so scorching hot that the poor doggies get burnt foot pads real quick.

So, with temperatures exceeding 85 degrees from sunup to sundown, there’s no opportunity for walks to the park or doing much playing outside. We have a wading pool in the backyard, but right now it’s too hot out there to enjoy it. All of us can hardly wait until the Fall when normal life can resume.

When daytime high temperatures drop into the 90’s we will resume outdoor patio life. That will include wading pool time and water hose splashdowns with the dogs. Booger and JayJay used to be big into this, but Baby got spooked early on in her youth and tries to avoid getting wet if she can manage it. Bonnie seems willing to give it a go: we’ve had her in the wading pool and she seems to like it. Maybe she will talk Baby into giving it another try?

This Summer has been a very healthy one for the dogs. Other than for BonBon’s puppy shots and wellness checks, the local vet has seen little of our pack (knock on wood!). Bonnie is still getting her puppy shots, will do a fecal sample this week just for drill, and we will soon be scheduling her spay procedure and i.d. chipping.

I’m thinking that our healthy pack may have something to do with the fact that we’ve been avoiding the neighborhood park, where all the dogs go to play, pee, and poop. It’s probably loaded with communicable diseases and all of that stuff gets splashed all over tossed balls, etc. Yuck…just like Chuckie Cheese.

And, so, we and our pack of Boston Terriers soldier on, bored as Hell in our coronavirus-induced quarantine, loving each other a lot but longing for fresh air and long walks in the neighborhood.

Gee, we sure miss that summertime RV life on the cool Pacific coast.

I’ve got something in common with the President of the United States: thin skin.

I believe I can thank my father Richard Manning for this affliction.

He was an automobile mechanic and always had bumps, scrapes, cuts, bruises, and scabs all over his arms and hands from doing manual labor all day long. My Dad never complained about his station in life, which included for forty-something years having dirty grease under his fingernails. (That stuff wouldn’t come out even with Boraxo soap. It was his badge of honor, probably.)

He was a tough guy. I can remember him accidentally stapling himself, slicing himself, burning himself, nailing himself, dropping heavy objects on his feet, falling off of ladders and roofs, and doing a 60-mph cartwheel while water skiing which blew out an eardrum. Did I mention that he had only one eye? It’s true: he lost it to a slingshot accident when he was a kid.

Like every other impediment in his life, he just brushed it off and kept plodding ahead.

The only times I ever heard him swear in my life were those occasions where an impact wrench fell on his head, he almost lost a finger to a band saw, or got a second traffic ticket in less than 5 minutes. (In that incident, he mouthed off to the officer who gave him the speeding ticket, then unsafely bolted back into traffic, whereupon the Highway Patrolman pulled him over again…grinning.)

One time he absolutely mashed his thumb with a sledge hammer in the garage, walked calmly into the house to my Mom, put the bloody, exploded appendage on the kitchen table, and said, “You got a BandAid?”.

I remember a few times when he would sit in his easy chair with a drill bit in the fingers of one hand and he would spin the bit and drill into a thumb nail that had been smashed…to relieve the pressure from the blood clot under the nail. The result was a short-lived, red geyser. Then he would go back to doing the crossword puzzle (which he completed every evening…in ink.)

I was skiing with him one day along with my brother Terry at Park City, Utah. As we came down the mountain, on pretty thin snow, I took a quick detour around a rock-strewn road. Both my brother and Dad, who were following me, took headers into the gravelly dirt and my Dad speared a sharp rock with his head. That guy could bleed; when we got down to the lodge, and my Mom saw him, it appeared that he’d been decapitated. No scab for this wound; he had to get stitched up.

More often than not, Richard Manning simply ignored bloody carnage and let the scabbing process do its magic.

However, when he got older his skin got thin, and he would get all manner of bruises, scrapes, and scabbed up hands and arms from minor brushes with objects. It was more noticeable then, because he was retired and wasn’t as active in the garage building or repairing things. (On a positive note, the axle grease under his fingernails were a thing of the past!)

MAYBE MY DAD’S DNA GOT DILUTED AS HE AGED? (Sounds plausible to me, but, then, I got a D in high school Biology.)

I’m retired now myself, approaching 73 years old (the same age as my Dad when he passed on!), and I have the curse: the old man’s thin skin.

I can’t seem to go a day without getting a new scrape from running into some stationary object, falling down while hiking, stabbing myself on cactus out in the backyard, getting scratched by dog paws, or ripping my epidermis while accomplishing a Honey Do project out in the garage. Even the skin on my shoulders and head is decorated with various irritations and roughness, and I’ve got some miniature scabs in my ears from who knows what.

Conversely, the skin on my feet and toes has thickened as I have aged! I have to get periodic pedicures to grind off the excessively thick, cracked skin. And, I have more hair in my nose and ears. What is THAT about?

These exceptions are not consistent with my hypothesis on DNA dilution! I will have to give that theory more thought.

As I was saying before I interrupted myself, my scabs have scabs. And I had just about become scab-free on my left hand a week ago when I brushed the exterior stucco wall with a knuckle…and scraped off a huge, deep chunk of skin the size of a dime. Geez, what a klutz. Add one more big scab to the inventory.

And now I can’t golf for a week! Dammit.

The only good thing about this thin skin problem of mine is that my wife Charlie LOVES scabs. She gets a perverse pleasure picking them (ask our kids!), even when the things aren’t yet healed. I sometimes have to restrain her from going after some of my healthier scabs. “He’s not ready!”, I’ll shout.

However, Charlie is also an ex-nurse, so she is quite adept at debriding my wounds and bandaging me up. That comes in handy, like it did today, because I tend to ignore the things, get my wounds dirty with landscaping manure and such, and let the dogs lick the things. (Who knows where those tongues have been, right?)

The point is that I am not that hygienic…except for strictly adhering to the Five Second Rule and always dousing myself with hand sanitizer after going to the supermarket.

Oh, yes…call me un-patriotic, but I always wear a facemask in public.

Other than that, I believe in the Golden Rule…I try not to bother germs, and I ask that they do likewise.

Luckily for me, Charlie can spot an infection ring around a pesky wound and order me to sit down so she can save my ass from tetanus or gangrene or worse.

Those Covid-19 germs don’t stand a chance against my woman.

She’s got my back…and my scabs!

“Do ya feel lucky, Punk?”

That was a famous punchline of San Francisco super-cop Dectective Harry Callahan back in the day. He was a law enforcement officer who wasn’t to be trifled with, whether it be by criminals or the criminal justice system itself. He saw his duty and “done it”.

Those “Dirty Harry” movies starring Clint Eastwood were a bit hit with Americans who felt that the justice system cared more about the rights of criminals than those of their victims. Callahan was a one-man vigilante squad, who might Mirandize a perp after putting him down with his famous .44 Magnum, “the most powerful handgun in the world…that could blow your head clean off”.

I liked all of the Dirty Harry movies, as did plenty of other Americans. Clint Eastwood made a fortune, and these action movies spawned an entire genre of such stuff. Charles Bronson, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone made massive coin by playing tough-guy cops. I remember an Arnold Schwartzeneggar cop movie where he vaporized a couple dozen hoods…in the credits, before the movie even started. That’s what you call “street justice”!

Sure, those movies made us feel good because (presumably) bad guys were being punished on the spot (no courts, no judges, no juries) with “extreme prejudice”. Just like the frontier townspeople who enjoyed a good old fashioned lynching of a horsethief, a bushwhacker, or scallywag of some sort. “Let’s get this done and get back to work”, was the thinking, I guess.

The only problem with street justice is that sometimes the wrong guy gets beat up or strung up. Sometimes it’s an accident (oops!) and sometimes it’s on purpose (to intimidate or exterminate certain populations). In dictatorships it’s the latter.

To some degree, our society can attribute overly aggressive and sometimes brutal police behavior to that era three or four decades back when fictionalized Dirty Harry law enforcement attitudes infiltrated our police departments. The popularity of that genre was that it “green lit” overly aggressive (and selective) informal codes of conduct that excused “forget the rules” behaviors by departmental “cowboys” and supposed-rogue officers. And the belief was that White Americans wanted it that way.

I’m guessing that a lot of schoolyard bullies joined up, envisioning permissible beat-downs and indiscriminate gun play. They were hired, they believed, not just to protect and serve but also to administer on-the-spot justice.

Unfortunately, it only takes one loudmouth to encite a riot or a lynching. Similarly, it only takes a few Dirty Harry “cowboys” to infect a police department. Wrongs are done against citizens, officers lie to cover up the misconduct, the police union exerts pressure on the police chief, the Mayor, and the District Attorney, and the misbehavior is rationalized, excused and forgotten. This emboldens the Dirty Harry’s of the department, and more liberties are taken.

Pretty soon the inmates are running the asylum, so to speak. That is, the rotten apples have good cops “looking the other way” when misconduct occurs, fibbing on after-action reports, not “ratting out” fellow officers when they commit egregious crimes under color of authority.

A culture is created and perpetuated. Anyone who dares to object to this law enforcement model is labeled “soft on crime”, a “Liberal”, or worse, a Democrat.

The next thing you know, a guy like George Floyd is murdered…for no good reason. Or, overzealous cops utilizing a no-knock warrant break into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, where she’s sleeping, and pump her with 8 pistol shots. The murderous assault took place on the wrong apartment…but the police union steadfastly proclaims the innocence of the Dirty Harry’s who shot first and asked questions later.

Question: When did we as a society agree that police officers can use deadly force whenever they want to?

Even soldiers in the U.S. armed forces are governed by “rules of engagement”. They can’t simply shoot, maim, rape, and plunder whomever they encounter…even if they’re angry. Our entire military establishment is governed by the Geneva Conventions, which bar heavy-handed tactics like torture and mistreatment of civilians and even captured soldiers.

However, the Dirty Harry model of law enforcement that is present in many jurisdictions today allows “stopping and frisking” innocent citizens, using tasers on mentally ill people, employing lethal chokeholds while apprehending suspected misdemeanor offenders, and using deadly force when a suspect doesn’t comply with orders or runs in fear from officers with drawn guns.

Video footage of many incidents that have been brought to the public’s attention reveals that often the first action of an officer exiting his patrol car is to draw his weapon. That is a mistake, as a police officer is only supposed to consider deadly force when his life or other lives are threatened by deadly force. Maybe police officers simply assume that every citizen suspected of any crime is “strapped” with a gun?

From the time the first Dirty Harry movie aired (1971) and the year 2000 gun ownership in America doubled. Currently there are more guns in the United States than people; in fact, there are 1.2 guns per person. It’s no wonder the police are jumpy.

In Great Britain, only four households out of 100 own a gun. Not surprisingly, most police officers there do not carry a sidearm. And they have less violent crime…and police-on-citizen deadly encounters.

Machoism by Dirty Harry cops, Dirty Harry wannabe civilians, and Dirty Harry politicians is a serious problem right now in this country. Instead of using brains to resolve issues, more police officers and civilians are using testosterone-fueled rage.

Unfortunately, we have a President who fits into this category.

There can be a fine line between public speech, civil disobedience, and outright anarchy. Most cities where mass protests ensued subsequent to the George Floyd murder by overzealous cops have resumed speed and the protesters have gone home, their initial job done. In a few other communities, where agitators spawned violence, like in Minneapolis, public officials regained control once the rage subsided.

I think that latter approach was being used by Portland officials before things there got real nasty. There was an “Occupy Wall Street”-type endeavor being perpetrated by activists who wanted to keep stirring the pot…focused on the Federal courthouse, which represented (to them) an uncaring and defiant American government and its leaders who were ignoring BLM issues.

The fact that the President of the United States publicly sided with the Dirty Harry police culture fed fuel to the fire. Understanding how Donald Trump’s mind works, it was probably intentional…because he can tout his “law and order” credentials to his MAGA political base and look effective as his small army of Federal goons swept into Portland to “help out”.

The fact that his stormtroopers arrived on scene in full military garb understandably encited the protesters to become further enraged. It was Kent State all over again, a testosterone-fueled show of force by a President who likes to bully opponents and employees.

If deescalating the situation was desirable, it would seem that the city and Feds could coordinate the temporary establishment of a several block restricted zone around the courthouse which would be subject to a curfew, where trespassing would incur immediate arrest, and where any violent activity within the cordon would be dealt with summarily. The serious, violent agitators, who could care less about Black Lives Matter, would realize that the fun and games are over.

That would be the end of it for now.

Of course, that would not achieve the President’s political goals of portraying Democratic leadership as “weak” and “dangerous” and establishing himself as a strongman who loves kicking ass.

Like Dirty Harry.

So, what is more likely in the days to come is escalation of violence…by both sides. It wouldn’t surprise me if tanks are on their way to Portland…

This Covid-19 pandemic is getting old.

A feeling of hopelessness has set in, as facemask-wearing in public has become normal, neighborhood potluck socials are verboten, bars and restaurants are shuttered, and tens of millions of people are facing evictions and starvation in the face. Pro sports are taking place absent cheering crowds, for God’s sake.

“Red State” governors who scoffed at public health advisories a few months ago and audaciously “re-opened” their economies to great fanfare now have their tails between their legs, as the virus, which knows no political bounds, is settling in for the long haul. Scores of hospitals in Florida, Texas, and Arizona now have zero ICU beds available while the Covid-19 infections continue to spike.

Our President, who just a few weeks ago publicly distained facemasks and considered similar-thinking followers “patriots”, is now advising everyone to wear one…while he continues to appear publicly without one.

The economy has one foot gingerly on the gas and the other on a banana peel. It’s trying hard to survive, but a huge swath (leisure) has taken a mortal blow, and millions of workers are unemployed and in dire straits. Financial institutions are facing enormous quantities of loan defaults in the next six months. Big corporations are downsizing. It must be tough to be looking for a job right now…and it will become much worse by year’s end.

Health-related industries and employees are probably safe for now, although tens of millions of Americans have already lost or will soon lose their medical insurance. My granddaughter Jessica, who just graduated from nursing school, was hired by a Southern California hospital this week.

I can hardly wait until the pandemic abates and she can assume the more routine duties of a normal hospital. As of right now, all urban hospitals are in crisis mode.

Our friend Dan Quinn ended up at a hospital the other day after experiencing difficult breathing for a spell. It turned out that he had possibly thrown a blood clot (from his legs). That’s pretty dangerous, when a clot can flow up and into the lungs…it’s called a pulmonary embolus and is often fatal. Charlie has had a few and had to spend some time in a hospital in an ICU. The problem right now is that most ICU beds in the Sun Belt are full up with Covid-19 patients. Dan is being treated at home with medicines; in normal times, he would probably spend a few days in the hospital being closely monitored.

The Covid-19 impact on hospitals is significant. Before the pandemic, hospitals were kept busy with the normal array of heart attacks, cancers, broken bones, internal issues, and emergencies. The need to treat those everyday afflictions and accidents hasn’t gone away, but many hospitals are so overloaded with Covid-19 patients and with the special protocols that have had to be employed to protect patients and staff that other services suffer. Doctors and nurses are putting in hellacious hours while exposing themselves (and their families) to potential infection and (future) PTSD.

It sucks right now to be a health professional.

Charlie and I each got a Covid-19 test last week. Some neighborhood friends had been exposed to a friend in Idaho (who subsequently died of Covid-19!), and we socialized with them when they returned from their trip. When they found out that they might have been infected, they told us to get tested.

That was about a month ago. It took us a week to be able to schedule an appointment, then several weeks past before our test, and it will be a week from then that we might find out if we’re infected. Please…will somebody invent a better mousetrap! How about something modeled after one of those one-use home pregnancy tests? It would be nice to know you’re infected before you inadvertently infect a couple of dozen other people.

It’s a bummer to think that society is going to have to batten down the hatches…once more…to stifle this virus. Hundreds of thousands of businesses put a lot of effort (and money) into devising protocols to allow them to re-open; now they face the prospect of shutting down again, for who knows how long. Most small businesses that are closed now are not going to reopen…at all.

The big issue right now is schools.

They had to shut down in the Spring when the epidemic was taking off. Parents had to home school their children, lots of learning took place “on-line”, and high school seniors had to forego proms and graduation ceremonies. It sucked; kids actually missed school and wistfully recalled the good old days…of school. Normal working parents had to stay home to baby sit their kids during the day, make meals, teach stuff, etc. It wasn’t good for sanity or the economy.

Now, with the pandemic revitalized (due to premature re-opening) the idea of seeing another school year disrupted has got politicians, parents, and teachers all lathered up trying frantically to imagine a scenario where it will be safe to send children to school in the midst of a health emergency. The President has pretty much declared “Full speed ahead!”, but cautious parents, scared teachers, and teachers’ unions are balking. The reality is that there may be no good options available.

The last thing that any politician wants to see is a Covid-19 superspreader hot spot at a local school, particularly if that politician strong-armed the re-opening of that school.

And pretty much everyone knows that it will happen and “thoughts and prayers” will have to be dispensed and blame cast in other directions.

Meanwhile, as they say out at the ranch, “It’s nut cutting time”; i.e. time for bold action. I don’t envy local school officials.

I’ve got a stash of facemasks and hand sanitizer in my car and a storage room in my garage that’s been stocked with rubbing alcohol, aloe vera, toilet paper, baby wipes, and paper towels. My big freezer is filled with meat, chicken, pork, and other goodies. Charlie and I are ready for Armageddon.

All of this is a shame and it didn’t have to happen this way. Other countries took the pandemic seriously and squelched the thing. Political leadership failed the American people, and many knuckleheads made a half-hearted effort to social distance, wash hands, wear masks, etc. Our supposed “exceptional” society failed the test, by going through the motions, impatiently chomping at the bit to get back to normal…and now our economy is disintegrating before our eyes.

George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”.

We lived this Hell just a couple of months ago…and didn’t learn the lesson. Instead, we listened to the siren song of politicians and self-described patriots who called the pandemic “overblown” and public health measures an “overreaction”. How gullible we were!

Accordingly, we will now endure an additional six months or so of the same Hell because science took a back seat to politics and self-interest.

As New York Yankee catcher/coach/manager and sage philosopher Yogi Berra once remarked, “It’s like déjà vu all over again”.

Yeah, unfortunately for us.

Yogi also famously quipped, “It’s not over until it’s over!”

Quit rubbing it in, Coach.

America is now three and one-half years into the Presidency of Donald Trump and, perhaps, staring at another four and one-half years of his unique brand of politics.

God save us.

Lots of people saw this grotesque presidency coming, but not enough of them actually got off their asses and went to their polling places. The warning signs were clearly evident to anyone who was paying attention. The candidate was a narcissist, a spoiled child who liked to play with other people’s money, and a businessman with a history of bad ideas, jilted investors, gypped vendors, mistreated minority tenants, and a bunch of bankruptcies to his credit.

Donald Trump had no experience in politics or government when he ran for the highest political office in the land. He also had very little grasp of the policy differences in the major political parties. In fact, he changed party affiliation five times from 1987 to 2012. Trump is famous for demanding and valuing loyalty; however he has been a Republican only since 2012 (when he decided to run for President).

And, beginning in 2016, he remade the Party in his own image.

Conservatives were worried when Trump began to make political noise. Way back in 2015, when he was beginning to make waves, conservative commentator Mary Katherine Ham characterized Trump as a “casual authoritarian”, saying “he is a candidate who has happily and proudly spurned the entire idea of limits on his power as an executive and doesn’t have any interest in the Constitution and what it allows him to do and what (it) does not allow him to do. That is concerning for people who are interested in limiting government.”

How insightful that conservative Republican turned out to be.

Fellow conservative Republican Charles Cooke of the National Review expressed similar views, terming Trump an “anti-Constitutional authoritarian”.

No truer words were ever spoken.

It is ironic that the Republican Party, which for over one hundred years had stood for “states rights”, strict interpretation of the Constitution, balanced budgets, strong military and economic alliances, and opposition to despotic regimes, decided in 2016 to throw their lot in with this anti-Constitutional authoritarian.

It was desperation time for a Party that was losing out to demographics. Time for a Hail Mary pass. “Let’s bring Trump off the bench and see what he can do”, Republicans thought. “What do we have to lose?”

It is very obvious now, knowing what we do after three and one-half years of Trumpism, that Donald Trump lied when he took the Presidential Oath of Office in January, 2017. At his inauguration, the new President swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America”.

And then, almost immediately, commenced to ignore provisions that he didn’t agree with, undermine the separation of powers, and find ways to expand the authority of the President by edict, by threatening members of his own Party, and by packing the Supreme Court with bootlickers. He was (and is) what Mr. Cooke thought he was, an “anti-Constitutional authoritarian”.

Think about that: an anti-Constitutional authoritarian leading a Constitutional democracy. How’s that going to work out? Autocracy vs. democracy: they are polar opposite concepts.

As we head for the 2020 elections, we have a President who:

 Does not support the free speech of opponents

 Thinks journalists are “enemies” of the State

 Believes that minority Americans are lesser citizens than Caucasian citizens

Eschews balanced budgets and ignores the Congressional role of setting budget priorities

 Flaunts the Constitutional prohibition against self-dealing (emoluments)

Consistently takes actions which favor Christian citizens over those of other religions

Administratively defunds regulatory agencies and functions established by Congress

Extorts foreign governments to aid in his reelectionAuthorizes unidentified, uniformed, masked and unbadged goons to quell anti-government protests

Refuses to allow Administration officials to testify before Congress

A sacred cornerstone of our democracy is the right of American citizens to vote for their governmental leaders. The elections function is administered by the States. Within certain parameters, each State determines how it conducts its elections and counts ballots, etc.

Probably because he doesn’t truly believe in a democratic form of government, Donald Trump has bad-mouthed the electoral process throughout his adult years. “It’s rigged”, he fond of saying. That was simply his opinion when he was a citizen voter; however, that kind of rhetoric coming from a leading American politician is inappropriate and, potentially, destabilizing to democracy.

Perhaps that is his intent.

The rigging of elections, according to Trump, is commonplace. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, President Trump took to bad-mouthing the elections process per a strategy developed by his political advisor Roger Stone (whose campaign improprieties in that election resulted in a felony conviction, and whose prison term for those offenses was commuted this month by his buddy Donald Trump).

Stone’s advice was for the President to publicly warn that “the system is rigged against the citizens”. Accordingly, Trump went on the attack, publicly calling the primary process “a rigged, disgusting dirty system”, advising that “early voting in Florida is very dishonest”, and complaining about massive “voter fraud” to deny him victory.

In fact, just before the election in 2016, the candidate told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio that, “The election is going to be rigged —I’m going to be honest. People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe.” A few days later, in Pennsylvania, he told supporters that, “The only way we can lose…is if cheating goes on”. At campaign stops he routinely made claims that Clinton was “out to steal the vote”.

The Trump/Stone campaign to delegitimize a national election while running for President was effective. A majority of Republican voters polled in October, 2016, a month before the election, believed that there is “a great deal of fraud in American elections”.

And then, surprising even himself, Donald Trump won the “rigged” election.

Once the dust had settled, Trump resumed his task of delegitimizing elections. Narcissist that he is, Trump had to bad-mouth the process…because he had lost the popular election by 3 million votes, casting some doubt upon his mandate to govern. According to the President, he would have steamrollered Hillary Clinton if not for millions of fraudulent votes cast by illegal immigrants, dead people, Democrats trucked into neighboring States, and bad guys stuffing mailboxes with fraudulent absentee ballots.

All of these imagined offenses were on the new President’s mind when in May 2017 he formed a Voter Fraud Task Force headed by Kris Kobach, then the Secretary of State of Kansas, who had long campaigned for more restrictive voting laws. (This task force was quietly disbanded in January 2018 after finding no evidence of widespread voting improprieties.)

Questioning the legitimacy of elections, even when it isn’t happening, serves the political goals of President Trump, whose bona fides with his conservative base are cemented by his strong stance on stricter immigration enforcement. The threat of illegal immigrants voting (there’s no evidence of that) against Republican candidates is a dog whistle that justifies, in conservative circles, harsher voting laws. These laws, which have been enacted in many Red states, have tended to suppress voting by minorities, thereby denying Democratic victories in districts that are majority Democratic in registration.

In 2018, when vote counting was finished and the Democrats had retaken control of Congress, President Trump declared that elections were being “stolen”.

With another three months or so left in the 2020 campaign, the President of the United States is again bad-mouthing the electoral process. In May, he warned that November would see “the greatest rigged election in history”.

Of concern to the President in 2020 is the effect that the Covid-19 pandemic will have on the conduct of elections. It has been probable for about six months now that routine, in-person polling place voting would be not possible, or prudent, in November because of the Covid-19 danger to voters and polling place workers, most of whom are elderly. Accordingly, many states have decided to expand the use of mail-in or absentee voting to ensure a good turnout without jeopardizing public health.

The President is enraged by this because: (1) it lends credence to the severity of the pandemic, which the President has strived to minimize; (2) it would probably result in more people voting, which is not in the President’s favor; and, (3) it would tend to thwart Republican voter suppression tactics which tailored to make in-person voting difficult if not impossible for minorities/economically disadvantaged citizens.

So, it is not surprising that President Trump has turned up the volume on claims of potential voter fraud. He’s now loudly complaining about “electoral corruption” in Blue states, predicting that foreign countries will print and submit phony mail-in ballots, forecasting a flood of undocumented immigrants voting in November, alleging that there will be illegal “ballot harvesting”, and claiming that mail-in voting is a lawless, unregulated exercise where ballots are stolen from mailboxes, voter signatures are routinely forged, etc.

The President of the United States has also publicly stated that “kids go and they raid the mailboxes and they hand them to people that are signing the ballots down the end of the street, which is happening, they grab the ballots. You don’t think that happens? There’s ballot harvesting.”

There is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims. If there was, he’d be touting it.

A Loyola Law School professor reviewed US elections from 2000 to 2014 and found 31 incidents of voter fraud from that time, during which more than a billion votes were cast. In both 2016 and 2018, approximately 25 percent of US voters cast mail ballots. Military personnel stationed overseas routinely vote by mail, as do American diplomats. President Trump has voted absentee (by mail) while in office: he must trust the process.

In fact, the only notable example of alleged fraud took place in 2018, when absentee ballots allegedly were picked up and falsified in a North Carolina congressional race under the direction of a political operative who was working on behalf of the race’s Republican candidate. That operative now faces obstruction of justice and perjury charges.

Despite the evidence that states, both Red and Blue, have systems and processes in place to prevent forgery, theft, and voter fraud, President Trump continues to blast his bullhorn at full volume. One of his latest targets is California’s Governor Gavin Newsome who, in the face of a raging resurgence of Covid-19 infections, issued an executive order expanding vote-by-mail in the state. “But in California, the governor sent, I hear, or is sending millions of ballots all over the state. Millions. To anybody. To anybody. People that aren’t citizens, illegals, anybody that walks in California is gonna get a ballot”.

Just recently our President has labeled voting-by-mail “corrupt”, “dangerous”, “fraudulent”, and susceptible to “cheaters”. This has to be unwelcome news for the Republican-controlled state of Utah, which has utilized 100 percent mail-in voting for quite some time.

Is President Trump alleging that those Republican Senators, Congressmen, and the Governor in Utah were fraudulently elected?

Typically, though, mail-in voting disadvantages Republican candidates because legislatures, governors and courts in Blue states have devised voter suppression efforts which focus on in-person voting. President Trump admitted as much recently when he said that voting-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans”.

Actually, it works out fine for Republican voters, because of convenience, but not for Republican candidates, because more opposition voters are allowed to vote.

This is the bottom line for Trump: he doesn’t care about rigged elections when the Russians help him rig one, but only cares if his voter suppression schemes are foiled.

Just what one would expect from an anti-Constitutional authoritarian.

UPDATE: President Trump’s new campaign strategy, to scare the Hell out of American citizens by proclaiming rampant anarchy that needs to be quelled by his anonymous Stormtroopers, seems to be working to his satisfaction.

He announced yesterday that he intends to send more armed, masked men in camouflage uniforms to other cities in the country…places that are governed by Democrats and are “out of control”. He’s now putting out campaign ads that portray him as “the law and order candidate” and describe opponent Joe Biden as encouraging violent “mobs” and being in favor of “defunding police departments”.

Those are lies, but Americans have come to expect that from the President of the United States.

This development has been awhile in coming, but is predictable. The economy is in shambles because Trump mis-managed the Covid-19 pandemic. The President has little positive to brag about right now. Traditionally, Presidents who are in trouble with a few months until an election pull a rabbit out of a hat…often its a war…to distract voters. Political scientists refer to it as an “October Surprise”.

This week President Trump pulled two rabbits out of the hat: (1) Igniting a war of words with China over alleged theft of scientific property; and, (2) Throwing jet fuel on Black Lives Matter protests, with the hope that armed conflict will erupt in more cities…justifying hero Trump and his posse of Brown Shirts to ride in and kick citizen ass.

He also not-so-loudly changed his tune about public health measures to combat the pandemic…after 141,000 deaths.

He said that he now supports and encourages the wearing of face masks in public to prevent the spread of infection. Well done, Sir! You’re only four months late.

The President stuck to his guns on Covid-19, though. He still insisted that “it will just go away some day”.

Like him, I hope.

“There’s somethin’ happening here,

What it is ain’t exactly clear,

There’s a man with a gun over there,

Telling me I’ve got to beware”

(“For What It’s Worth”, Buffalo Springfield, 1967)

People in authority don’t like folks who protest against the actions of people in authority. Even though free speech is a cornerstone of our democracy, it is barely tolerated by politicians who want to do whatever they want to do. “Thank you for your input. Now, go back to your corner!”

Mayors, police chiefs, governors, and even Presidents don’t appreciate opponents of theirs in the streets “singing songs and carryin’ signs, mostly say hooray for our side”.

It’s embarrassing, it’s invariably on the 6 o’clock news (and consumes social media), and it’s hard for your public relations folks to spin in a positive way. People in power like to do their dirty work in the shadows; public protests reveal the ugly underbelly of politics. These things have got to be quashed, the sooner the better, so that the status quo can resume speed.

One of the most common tactics is for politicians to brand the protesters as “anarchists”, the assembled group a “mob”, and their civil disobedience as a “riot”.

This labeling distracts the public from the issue being protested and, simultaneously, justifies law enforcement to swing batons, shoot rubber bullets, throw tear gas canisters into crowds, and turn a peaceful march into a panicked stampede. In the police-instigated melee, sometimes the assaulted protesters fight back…and then, just as predicted (and caused), a riot ensues by a “mob” that is angry not about the original issue but rather the brutality of police officers.

“Law and order” appears to have prevailed, but an ugly scar remains, the original problem festers, and people become more resentful.

Congressman John Lewis, who died the other day, was arrested 45 times in his younger days while protesting for civil rights in the South. He was also burned, beaten, water hosed to the ground, and had dogs set upon him by aggressive police who called him “Nigger”, “Communist”, and worse.

He and his buddy, Dr. Martin Luther King, eventually got the politicians’ attention.

President Donald Trump, who is obviously learning-impaired, is using heavy-handed tactics to stifle protests that are disrupting his 2020 election campaign. He got on the wrong side of the George Floyd issue, and is now trying to brand social justice protesters as “mobs”, “rioters”, and “Antifa” guerrillas.

Since the issue (police brutality against people of color) isn’t going away soon enough for his taste, the President is resorting to brute force to make the public distraction (to his optimistic campaign messaging) go away.

Trump’s use of un-badged Federal forces in military camo to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park in Washington D.C….so he could do a photo op holding a Bible in front of a small church…was a sign that he’s not amused by the First Amendment. In that incident, American citizens who were exercising their right to free speech, were pelted with tear gas and stampeded.

So much for the U.S. Constitution.

Evidently emboldened by this power play, President Trump has now organized a military detachment of dubious provenance (unmarked uniforms, no name tags, no Federal agency claiming responsibility…hence no accountability) to harass protesters in Northwest cities. In some cases, citizens have been grabbed by the mysterious camouflaged, masked men and thrown into unmarked vehicles and spirited away to fates unknown.

The mayors of the cities involved (Portland and Seattle) did not ask the President for this “help” and, in fact, have publicly asked him to cease and desist these tactics. They have not declared an emergency or asked for assistance from the National Guard or, certainly, from the President’s armed posse.

It is apparent that President Trump is doing this for two reasons: (1) to scare Americans into believing that mob anarchy is running rampant in this Nation; and, (2) to demonstrate that he is a “strong” leader who knows how to deal with “mobs”, “rioters”, anarchists, socialists, Communists, Liberals, and Democrats who want to ruin America.

In other words, he’s trying to scare up some votes for his failing campaign. He says he’s the “Law and Order” candidate.

The Trump Administration has routinely plumbed the depths of impropriety and malfeasance, but this latest tactic of utilizing a secret army to carry out political tasks just about takes the cake. It’s the kind of behavior that is usually associated with thug dictators, not leaders of democracies, and certainly not the kind of thing that is kosher (or legal) in the so-called Greatest Nation on Earth.

We’ve fought wars and engineered the overthrow of dictators where such tactics were employed. The Taliban, Saddaam Hussein, South American dictators in the 1970’s and 1980’s and others routinely used masked goons to enforce rules, silence critics, and “disappear” citizens.

Adolph Hitler had a devoted group of thugs like this called the “Brown Shirts”. They looted, burned, and murdered Nazi critics and Jews to advance the Fuhrer’s agenda.

Vladimir Putin, upon whom President Trump has lauded praise, employed Russian forces in unmarked uniforms (“Little Green Men”) to invade Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014. Putin denied responsibility, saying that the invaders must have been indigenous patriots. It worked: the Russians now control 7 percent of Ukrainian territory.

So, we now have a President of our own who believes that there are no rules or constraints on his behavior. He got away with it when he attempted to extort the Ukrainian President to help his re-election (i.e. Trump was impeached by Congress but the Senate gave him a free pass), and now he has put together a 21^st Century Praetorian Guard, answerable only to him, to do his political bidding while masked and in combat fatigues.

The President of the United States, protector of our Constitutional rights, is now assaulting and “disappearing” citizens who are exercising their right to assemble and speak.

As an attorney in Oregon said, “When we see masked men in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping.”

Will waterboarding be next?

UPDATE: President Trump’s new campaign strategy, to scare the Hell out of American citizens by proclaiming rampant anarchy that needs to be quelled by his anonymous Stormtroopers, seems to be working to his satisfaction.

He announced yesterday that he intends to send more armed, masked men in camouflage uniforms to other cities in the country…places that are governed by Democrats and are “out of control”. He’s now putting out campaign ads that portray him as “the law and order candidate” and describe opponent Joe Biden as encouraging violent “mobs” and being in favor of “defunding police departments”.

Those are lies, but we’ve come to expect that from the President of the United States.

This development has been awhile in coming, but is predictable. The economy is in shambles because Trump mis-managed the Covid-19 pandemic. The President has little positive to brag about right now. Traditionally, Presidents who are in trouble with a few months until an election pull a rabbit out of a hat…often its a war…to distract voters. It’s referred to as an “October Surprise”.

This week President Trump pulled two rabbits out of the hat: (1) Igniting a war of words with China over alleged theft of scientific property; and, (2) Throwing jet fuel on Black Lives Matter protests, with the hope that armed conflict will erupt in more cities…justifying hero Trump and his posse of Brown Shirts to ride in and kick citizen ass.

He also not-so-loudly changed his tune about public health measures to combat the pandemic…after 141,000 deaths.

He said that he now supports and encourages the wearing of face masks in public to prevent the spread of infection. Well done, Sir! You’re only four months late.

The President stuck to his guns on Covid-19, though. He still insisted that “it will just go away some day”.

Like him, I hope.

Never trust anyone who claims to be an expert on economics: if he knows the answer you want, he can come up with the statistics to prove it.

The more I read about the arcane science the more I realize how little I know. However, I do know about fish, particularly decaying fish. It has a particularly bad odor, very similar to the American economy right now.

Unemployment is supposedly at 16 percent right now, which is high, but the full effect of the “shutdowns”, both the ones we experienced in the Spring and those being re-imposed now, are yet to be felt because we’re still affected by the “sugar high” induced by the governmental stimulus packages. Even still, it is very possible that we could end 2020 with 50 million people out of work.

Or worse.

That is because the Covid-19 pandemic has roared back stronger than ever, invading virtually every state in the Union. Tens of millions of Americans (including our President) chose to ignore the recommendations of health experts in favor of flaunting their “freedom” to be selfishly irresponsible, and now the Nation is going to suffer a grotesque plague and devastated economy.

In the midst of this calamity, the stock market is booming. How can that be?

Businesses large and small are failing, the projected GDP of the United States is actually going to shrink, and tens of millions of households and businesses will soon be defaulting on mortgages, loans, lines of credit, and such. The economic meltdown of 2020/21 will dwarf that which we endured in 2008.

So, what’s “up” with the stock market? Shouldn’t it be “down” like the underlying economy?

The simple answer is that investors are participating in a mammoth Ponzi operation funded by the Federal Reserve.

All of those trillions of dollars that the Fed recently infused into the economy are propping up share prices. Large businesses that have lost their customer base (i.e. leisure industries like airlines, car rental, hotels, cruise lines, restaurants, casinos, conventions centers, sports franchises, bars, nightclubs, strip joints, and such) are simply taking advantage of cheap money (the prime rate is near zero) to borrow.

The big banks and financial institutions aren’t worried: they’re “to big to fail”. As in 2008, if things go to shit, the Federal government will bail them out.

Ten percent of Americans own 85 percent of the publicly traded stock. Normally, in bad economic times, investors would flock to the safe haven of bonds. However, the return on bonds right now is bupkis. So, with a bunch of free money available for play, the richest Americans are dabbling in stocks. In gambling it is called “playing with house money”: the player can’t lose.

For the past three plus years America has been led by an individual who has played with house money ever since he was a kid. He got a couple hundred million dollars from his Dad, it made him think he was smart, he made a lot of bad business decisions, and suffered a bunch of bankruptcies. However, he was a good salesman who could always find new buckets of house money from gullible banks to play with. Most recently, the Federal Reserve has been his “Huckleberry”.

At some point, probably at about the time investors realize that Donald Trump is not going to be reelected, Ka-Boom, the stock market bubble will burst in a big way. Then, the market and the economy will match up.

America will be in a very depressed state.

It’s going to take a decent amount of time for an effective vaccine to be developed, mass produced, distributed, and inoculated into a receptive population. There will be new battles over immunization: the anti-vaxxers will be out in full force, scaring the bejeezus out of people. There may have to be multiple injections to develop long-term immunity. It will take a multi-year effort to achieve some sort of herd immunity for Covid-19.

Let’s hope it works.

Meanwhile, society will be dealing with one-third or more able-bodied Americans out-of-work. Unless jobs can be found for them, poverty, sickness, and crime will skyrocket. It will be the kind of environment that is ripe for social unrest like our country faced in the 1930’s.

It will be time for a “New” New Deal.

In the Thirties, the Federal government created jobs to build public buildings, national parks, dams, bridges, and such.

This time out, we need to replace public facilities…many of which are those same 90-year-old New Deal projects. Infrastructure improvement, of any kind, will put people to work building things that will help the economy run at full speed.

We also need to build our economy “smarter”, so that we’re not so reliant on global supply chains. The information gleaned from the catastrophe of 2020 can be used to identify industries that need to be bolstered with Federal support. Home grown “widgets” may cost more, but we’d be employing American workers and our supply chain would begin and end stateside.

We’ve also learned from our current predicament how dependent our economy is on “leisure” industries. Perhaps we need to re-tool so that we’re producing more of the things that other countries want to buy? Like food. Or, perhaps, re-tool so that we don’t need commodities from other countries? Like oil from the war-torn Middle East, or personal protection equipment from China.

Before 2020, America was beginning to fall behind industrialized nations in education. There is a world of untapped potential in our citizenry, folks who can’t get a higher education due to their economic circumstances. We might want to consider a “G.I. Bill”-type benefit for anyone who puts in 4 years of New New Deal (NND) work for the Federal government. Perhaps that benefit is an online University degree? Part of the NND could be development and staffing of said University.

In 1945, our enemies, the Germans and the Japanese, were left with their countries in ruins, the citizenry was demoralized, and the standard of living was devastated. Twenty years later their economies had recovered substantially and within another twenty years they enjoyed global super economies.

What did they have in common? They were able to re-tool many industries from scratch, so they were able to utilize the latest technology.

We have many factories in the Rust Belt and elsewhere that look as devastated as Dresden. Perhaps they could be re-tooled into producing products that we can use internally and can sell excess externally. The labor force is there, ready, willing and able.

Maybe we commit to 100 percent electric vehicles in five years or so. That would keep assembly lines moving.

If our Nation can afford to print money to enable a massive Ponzi operation on Wall Street, then it can afford to print money to employ NND workers to re-tool America’s industries, build needed public works, and provide an on-line college opportunity to those who serve.

All it would take is paper and ink. And some smart people.

We’ve got lots of those things.

The dogs were moping around this morning, appearing to be mentally and physically exhausted.

Something was up.

After close examination of the premises, we found numerous dried-up turds that BonBon had deposited in various areas over the past 24 hours. That little bitch: she’s a stealth shitter!

We can usually tell when she’s done the deed because the other two, Booger and Baby, will skulk around with their ears pinned to their skulls, as if saying, “IT WASN’T ME, HONEST TO GOD!” That’s what was happening this morning but we didn’t pick up on it until later.

We honestly thought they were worn out, because we had guests on Saturday night through Sunday morning: our adopted son Jason, his daughter Bailey, and their Blue Tick Coon Hound “Dixie”. The three of them were making the return trip from Colorado back toward Las Vegas.

Dixie is a 60-lb energetic dog who commands attention while toying with our three mutts. The dog will bark loudly when excited, which gets your attention. Generally speaking, the four dogs get along okay. Dixie has even learned to go through our doggie door.

What we didn’t know when Jason and Bailey got here was that Dixie had mauled Jason’s Alaskan Husky, “Ashka”, when they were up in Colorado. Evidently, there was a beef over some food treats and Dixie just pounced on 50 lb. Ashka and bit her severely on the neck. Ashka ended up in the local animal hospital getting stitches. Jason was really pissed at his daughter for not having control over her dog.

We knew none of this when our guests arrived. Had we known we would never have allowed Dixie in our home with our three small dogs. She could have ended BonBon’s young life with one chomp.

I think it was irresponsible of Jason to keep this information from us. If anything had happened, we would have been devastated. Luckily for him, and our dogs, nothing untoward occurred. All of us kept Dixie, who we know is food-obsessed, away from our dogs when they were eating.

Speaking of dogs, little BonBon is getting bigger. She was 4.2 pounds when we received her, and she now weighs 5.8 pounds.

The little bugger is still small enough to get under couches, beds and things. As a matter of fact, she will go under these things and chew on anything she can get her sharp little teeth on.

An audiovisual tech named “Bob” was here last week to set up our Wireless Joey Dish receiver for the outdoor patio entertainment wall (see photo below). While here, BonBon chewed on his tool belt which was on the ground in the living room.

I mentioned to Bob that BonBon has a habit of chewing on extension cords under the couches in the great room. He told me a story about a friend whose little dog did the same and got his ass FRIED awhile back. Bob said that we should not have live electrical cords anywhere that BonBon might chew them while she is teething.

Good idea.

We immediately removed all of the living room lamps and such with extension cords. Wouldn’t that be a tragedy if our little bundle of joy got the shock of her life! Too terrible to contemplate.

The three dogs are not enjoying the scorching Summer here in Mesquite.

No walks (it’s 90 degrees in the morning!) and the concrete pavers and artificial grass in the backyard get obscenely hot during the daytime. The older dogs go out the doggie door to do their business, but they make it quick and stay on the cooler gravel.

Poor BonBon! We are trying to potty train her by taking her outside to the grass, but she immediately gets hot paws and scampers back into the shade of the patio…where she pees on the indoor-outdoor carpet. Not what we had in mind. No wonder she pees and poops in the house: if she would take the time to squat outside, she might scorch her toes. So, that’s her excuse, and she’s sticking to it.

That little dog is going to be a pistol. She jumps right into the fray when Booger and Baby are hassling over a toy, and she gives as good as she gets. Occasionally she will get mad at one of the other dogs and she will run after them snarling and barking, wanting to get a piece of them. It’s pretty funny, because they outweigh her by twenty pounds. The other day, BonBon tried this tactic with Baby, who grabbed her and body-slammed the puppy. HaHa.

Despite that, she is absolutely in love with Baby, and vice versa. They play all of the time together, nap on the couch together, and even sleep in our bed at night right near each other. So, they are definitely BFF’s and should have a wonderful life together for the next ten years or so.

I hope we last long enough to enjoy all of it.

Booger is still our Queen. She is approaching 13 years old and is slowing down, for sure. The legs have lost their spring, and she plays with the other dogs from time to time, but she’s paid her dues and is living the life she wants to at this stage. She will often go to bed with us but change places at night, preferring to stretch out on the living room sofa in the wee hours. It’s okay, whatever makes her happy.

We definitely miss the RV life on the cool coasts of Oregon and California. Next year, come Hell or high water, we will be hitting the road again.

Covid willing, of course.

Awhile back, maybe a month ago, I remarked that no one I knew had yet tested positive for Covid-19.

That was back in June when President Trump was proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” over the coronavirus. “We’re on top of it”, he said, and “besides, when it gets warm it will just go away”.

It’s Summer now, and that is not what has happened.

I now know a bunch of people who now have or have had Covid-19. Our CPA friend, Joe and his wife and family, are now sick. Our friend Sandy’s friend “Pete” from Las Vegas contracted the virus while she was heading there to see him. Our neighbors Al and Cindy Howa, who begged out of that neighborhood potluck on the 4^th like we did, found out a couple of days ago that they were exposed to Covid-19 while at a family gathering in Idaho. Wow, if they were infected and attended that party here with 20 senior citizens, it could have been a disaster.

We have learned that our contractor Adam may have been exposed. He is looking to be tested. Gee, that guy stayed in our house for two nights last week!

Anyway, Charlie and I have decided to get tested, just to be sure.

Good luck with that!!

One must get an appointment to get tested, and then there’s a considerable wait time before the test results are known. We got an appointment yesterday for a test in two weeks, then we’ll have to endure another week or so to find out if we’ve been infected.

By that time, if we had been infected, we’d likely be very sick, in a hospital ICU (if there were any beds left!), or we could be dead from complications.

When some writer pens the history of the Covid-19 pandemic decades from now, there will be many mistakes to be discussed, I’m sure. The biggest fuck-up of all, though, will have to be the “testing program”, which must have been designed by the Keystone Cops.

According to epidemiologists, testing is key to identifying who has the virus, tracing where the infected person acquired it, testing and quarantining all of those infected, and treating those who have become ill.

This is how a civilized nation handles a serious epidemic. The countries who observed these protocols religiously have done well and have “re-opened” their economies gingerly. They trusted science and their citizens didn’t act like spoiled children.

Of course, the United States is “exceptional”, and those rules of thumb don’t apply to us, evidently. Our President and his Administration at first pretended that the coronavirus was “just the flu”, there was scant infection in America, and that the virus would simply go away when the weather got warm.

When news of a spreading pandemic went viral, President Trump publicly stated that “anyone who wants a test can be tested. And the tests are all perfect.” His Administration, he claimed, was providing any and all states with the test kits that they needed.

That March 6^th statement was a lie. It is now July 8^th, four months later, and my wife and I must wait two weeks to get our test.

Donald Trump was probably confused because instantaneous testing was available at that time…for the President of the United States. According to statements he’s subsequently made, he gets tested every day! This is why, he says, he doesn’t need to wear a facemask in public.

(And, by behaving that way, he scoffs at the recommendation of his own Coronavirus Task Force, setting a poor example for all citizens. That’s Presidential leadership in action, folks: encouraging citizens to mistrust science.)

As we have learned in the past few months, there was not only a dearth of Covid-19 test kits available to doctors and emergency rooms back in March, but the CDC-approved kit was defective: it found some infected people to be non-infected and non-infected people to be infected. So, the results were highly suspect, in effect…useless to doctors.

Not “perfect”.

Even today, four months later, tests being administered routinely show false negative results (i.e. no infection detected) of 30 percent. So, retesting, particularly if the patient shows symptoms, is often required.

Still, not “perfect”.

Improved test kits are now more plentiful but are still in short supply. Since the “re-opening” of the economy that President Trump badgered governors into doing in June, Covid-19 infections have skyrocketed throughout the country, and test kits are becoming scarce in many localities.

Now that massive testing is in progress, the medical labs that process such tests are overwhelmed by the volume.

And those labs are experiencing shortages of critical supplies like chemical reagents and pipettes.

As I recall, months ago, President Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to lead a special logistical task force to make sure our public health system got all the supplies necessary to do its job. It appears that nepotism, as usual, isn’t as effective as finding the right guy for the job.

Maybe that is the reason why the President, at his recent Tulsa rally, stated, “I told my people to slow down the testing!” Fewer tests, fewer supplies required, less embarrassment for Jared. I can see how it may have made sense to his father-in-law.

It is Summer now, it is scorching hot all over the Nation, and the epidemic is going full speed ahead. According to “Doctor Trump”, the virus was supposed to magically disappear in hot weather. That’s not happening, at least not in Nevada and Arizona, where the daytime temperatures are now in the 100’s.

The Nation has been experiencing 50,000 new cases per day in the past week, and the death toll now exceeds 134,000 Americans. Epidemiologists are now predicting 200,000 victims by the Fall…when the normal flu season will be upon us.

Looking an epic failure in the face, and needing someone to blame for it (besides himself), the President has begun to throw public spidwads at the CDC and it’s chief epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. It’s his fault, the President wants us to believe, that our Chief Executive (and titular leader of the fight against Covid-19) has failed to wear a face mask in public.

Since Dr. Fauci, a world-reknowned scientist, is more respected and popular with the American public than he is at this moment, President Trump has engaged other Administration lackeys to publicly snipe at Dr. Fauci and the CDC, as if they caused the pandemic, the 140,000 deaths, and the economy that can’t reboot because people are still sick and afraid.

This past week, Peter Navarro, one of the President’s chief economic advisors, authored an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times which blamed Dr. Fauci for the Administration’s lame effort against Mr. Covid. Navarro said that virtually everything that Dr. Fauci had told the American public about the coronovirus had been wrong.

Wrong.

I’ve listened to Dr. Fauci for the past five months or so, and pretty much everything he has been allowed (by the President) to say has been on point considering that that Covid-19 is a new coronavirus that scientists are learning about on the the fly.

Actually, it was Peter Navarro and his buddy, Donald Trump, who went “all in” on the supposed hydroxychloroquine “game changer” (to quote the President) back in March. It turned out to be fake news, like most of the stuff Navarro and Trump have been broadcasting for the past three years.

By the way, how are those tariffs that you recommended working out, Mr. Navarro?

Donald J. Trump, M.D. weighed in again this past week, announcing that “99 percent of Covid-19 cases are benign”. Once again, that insignificant “one percent” factor that justifies the President’s dismissive attitude relative to a number of subjects.

Truth be told, the mortality rate of Covid-19 in the United States presently exceeds 4 percent of known infections. Additionally, almost one million patients have been hospitalized and have recovered. That is a lot of suffering from something that is so “benign”.

I’m sure the kin of the 140,000 Americans who have died (thus far!) would like to debate the benign-ness of this plague.

Which begs the question: If Covid-19 is essentially harmless, why is President Trump being tested every day?

For some reason, the Trump Administration is running “Operation Warp Speed” to quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine, hopefully in the next few months, so that it can announce a “miracle” before November 3^rd.

Yeah, that’s right: spending a billion dollars to find a cure for a… benign illness!

This curiosity begs an even bigger question: When/if a Covid-19 vaccine is developed, should Americans trust it?

After all, the Nation has been browbeaten by its President to not trust science, whether it be about the pandemic itself, its seriousness, the recommendations of experts, wearing face masks in public, and the safety of re-opening the economy in the midst of high infection rates.

The Trump cult believes that scientists and experts cannot be trusted on any subject: only trust the word of Donald Trump.

So, it doesn’t take much imagination to predict what is coming down the pike: a pre-Election announcement by the President that a miracle vaccine has been developed to put an end to the horrible pandemic.

Don’t laugh. It’s coming.

But, why should we believe that this hastily-developed vaccine will work and not have negative side effects? After all, it will have been developed by…scientists.

Because Donald J. (Hydroxychloroquine) Trump, amateur physician and epidemiologist, says so.

Testing 1-2-3…