The Big Heat

2020 was kind of suck-ass here in Portland.

First antifa and BLM ran riot in the streets and burned the whole goddamn town down.

And then we had massive forest fires that burned the whole goddamn woods down.

And then we had goddamn MAGAts that came around trying to sweep the goddamn ashes into Idaho's goddamn trash bin.

Jesus wept!

And then - just this past weekend - we had a giant, creepy iron high-pressure dome or something come oozing in off the Pacific and hunker down over us for three days or so bringing the big heat.

As in, 115 degree heat.

Cliff Mass at his Weather Blog has some terrific posts discussing what happened and why. Here was his warning Sunday afternoon:

Tomorrow: The Day of Unimaginable Extremes

But tomorrow, it all goes horribly wrong.  The thermal trough moves northward and westward, pushing the strong easterly, downslope flow northward to over the central Cascades (see map for 11 AM Monday).  The sinking air will compress/warm as it sinks.

The burst of downslope, compressional heating will cause temperatures to warm beyond the experience of any living inhabitant of the region (see forecast temperatures at 5 PM Monday).  

Temperatures will rise above 112F on the eastside of Puget Sound and above 100F for everyone more than a few miles from the water.  Portland will be similarly warm.  And so will the lower elevations of the Columbia Basin. 

The first and most obvious question is; "is this due to a warming climate"?

And Mass' answer (and mine, since his data appears quite sound) is; sorta;

"...a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event.   

Is global warming contributing to this heatwave?  The answer is certainly yes.  

Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming.  The answer is yes as well. 

Our region has warmed by up to 1-2F during the past fifty years and that will enhance the heatwave. Increasing CO2 is probably the biggest contributor to the warming. 

But consider that the temperature anomalies (differences from normal) during this event will reach 30-35F. The proximate cause of this event is a huge/persistent ridge of high pressure, part of a highly anomalous amplification of the upper-level wave pattern. 

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic). 

So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense."

I do wonder if the intensity of the tropical storm that helped create this immense high pressure ridge might have been heightened by the warming climate...but, I defer to the subject matter experts.

So how did we do here in the Fire Direction Center?

Pretty much just fine.

I hid inside all weekend, pretty much, other than taking my Bride and the Larvae to the airport Sunday morning for their pilgrimage to the Gramma Shrine.

It was pretty damn hot when I dropped them off at 11:00am...by Monday morning it was insane:

By Monday afternoon it had gone waaaayyyy past insane...

The Little House is one of the fortunate older ones here in the Portland region to have had central air installed. So I cranked that baby and kept it cranked all through until the heat broke Monday night.

Mind you, when the outside of the house is 112 degrees even the butch-est air conditioner struggles. On Monday afternoon the thermostat was set to 72 but the interior temperature was 83. That was the best the poor bastard could do; fight a delaying action against the heat.

It worked well enough.

With the family off tickling grandparental fancies just the cats shared the Big Heat with me.

Mostly they were smart enough to stay indoors to do their eat-and-sleep-repeat cat thing. But, being cats, they couldn't STAY indoors, so every hour or so they'd swagger out into the heat in a manner entirely inappropriate for an animal wearing a fur coat.

Once there, mind, they'd flop over and just lie there, like, maybe it was too hot to do anything, like, move. No shit, cats.  No wonder you aren't the top of the food chain, never mind the whole opposable-thumbs thing.

The residents that suffered the most were the vegetables.

My daughter has recently developed a huge taste for gardening. So the Little Yard is now verdant with plants of all kinds, mostly flowers. We have random sunflowers along edges and by fences, potted plants on benches and tables, raised beds full of goodies...they're all over the place, and the Girl is besotted with her flowers.

And it is flowers. The Bride and I are raising tomatoes and squash and peas. The Girl is raising dahlias and zinnias and passionflowers.

(The Boy is raising nothing but digital hell in the HALO universe, so he's not really in the frame...)

Well, most of the in-ground plants came through the big heat okay...

...a little wilted by Monday night when I went out to water again (I'd watered in the morning, as well) but still living. But the potted ones..?

...not so much. Three of the Girl's beloved dahlias look pretty fried. I'm still watering when I do the rest of the garden, but I'm not hopeful.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fire direction crew are unimpressed by the historical (and historically awful) event they just lived through, as the Senior Enlisted remarked when we woke up Tuesday and walked out into a cool morning;

Little Cat: My butt cold. Why my butt cold? Where hot?
Me: It's gone, the heat wave is over. We're back to normal-ish.
LC: My butt cold. No like!
M: Yeah, well, it is what it is. Have some cat food.
LC: No! Where hot? No like! You fix!
M: I can't fix the weather, doof. Look, there's some nice kibbles.
LC: Meh. You fix.
M:
LC:
M: Fuckit, Imma drink my coffee. You do whatever.
LC: ...the fuck? The goddamn service around this place has completely gone to hell. I'm going over here until I can speak to your manager.

K. Good luck with that.

The South Dakota Borderers

Those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes. 

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update, 6/29 pm: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

 

The Maltese Cat

 I was at loose ends the other night - just finished my last book, didn't have a new one in view, and wasn't interested in the offerings of the tube - and I was pulling over the shelves beside the bed and came across my old 1898 volume of The Day's Work.

It's not the first edition, unfortunately, but the second, and was picked up in a rumpled old used bookstore along the coast, I think, had before and has since then seen a lot of wear. The spine is broken and the pages are hanging on by the threads of the sewn binding. I've cared for it gently, but it's not in great shape.

And...it's an...odd little book.

There's thirteen stories within it and they're all rather slantendicular and many are paranormal, ranging from the truly weird The Brushwood Boy (where our hero, the stock-Kipling stalwart young infantry officer, meets the woman of his dreams literally in the surrealist dreams which they share) to some Anglo-Indian romanticizing (The Bridge Builders, where a similar British hero - bridge engineer rather than subaltern - is subsumed in a conclave of the talking creatures that represent the old Indian gods his creation has disturbed) to straight-up anthropomorphism in the Jungle Book-style.

Some of them I enjoy more than others (I've never actually managed to struggle through .007 or William The Conqueror Part 1 and my tolerance for his full-throated paeans to colonialism like The Tomb of His Ancestors - as clever and touching a tale as it is, and it is clever, and parts of it are touching -is fairly limited; I've read too many Indian authors to elide the "faithful native" claptrap that comes with Kipling in paint-the-map-red mode.

Though not as impatient as George Orwell was; his takedown of the guy is pretty epic (has ever a writer or poet been dismissed as brutally and summarily as this: "He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks."? Daaaaamn...)

The Kipling I loved as a child and the least harrumph-able are his animal tales. The echoes of imperial hubris are faint in the Jungle Books (although I have my eye on Bagheera, that fusty old colonial mug...) and there's a version in The Day's Work - a story about polo.

I know absolutely nothing about the game other than it's a ballgame played on horseback and supposedly the Argentines are now the bosses of it. I know that to play at any sort of high level today you have to be filthy rich, because it's a horse thing and all horse things are rich now that horses are a luxury good and not a working tool.

Not in the 1890s, though (or more likely the 1880s, the period when the guy was working in British India); a British officer rode to work, and keeping an extra hayburner or three wasn't so much of a big deal.

Hence the story; our hero, the gray polo pony of the title, and his equine teammates are carrying the British officers of an Indian engineer outfit (they're called "pioneers", which were the 19th Century version of combat engineers - the guys who built fortifications and bridges and all that. "Sappers" were the tunnel guys, which was a separate specialty...). They're playing a fancy cavalry (meaning: rich) outfit for the Big Casino, and the story is the story of that game.

That's it, that's the bones. The real meat is in the telling, and that's where our guy Kipling gets to cut loose.

"The question was which pony should make way for the other; each rider was perfectly willing to risk a fall in a good cause. The black who had been driven nearly crazy by his blinkers trusted to his weight and his temper; but Benami knew how to apply his weight and how to keep his temper. 

They met, and there was a cloud of dust. The black was lying on his side with all the breath knocked out of his body. The Rabbit was a hundred yards up the ground with the ball, and Benami was sitting down. He had slid nearly ten yards, but he had had his revenge, and sat cracking his nostrils till the black pony rose.

‘That’s what you get for interfering. Do you want any more?’ said Benami, and he plunged into the game. 

Nothing was done because Faiz Ullah would not gallop, though Macnamara beat him whenever he could spare a second. The fall of the black pony had impressed his companions tremendously, and so the Archangels could not profit by Faiz Ullah’s bad behaviour."

A little over 7,000 words paints a vivid little picture of a place and a time and a day and the people - including the four-hooved people - in it. In that short space Kipling gives you a whole cast of characters, from Lutyens and Macnamara and Powell above the saddles to grumpy Benami and slippery Faiz Ullah and Who's Who snorting through his nose in Australian below.

So buried in this largely-forgotten volume from a now-widely dismissed author is this perfect little gem of a tale; brightly and briskly told, sharply drawn, thoroughly engaging and entertaining even to a reader who, over a century later, knows almost nothing about the subject and the setting.

Goddamn it, that's writing.

That's why it's hard to just toss Kipling into the dustbin of history as just another imperial relic. Yes, he's all the things his detractors, that Orwell, say he is. But, dammit, the man could write when the humor was on him, and he's left us with stories like this. That has to count for something.

As we discussed in the last post here; life is complicated, and sometimes we just have to accept that there is worth to be found in some dark places, and darkness in the shiniest of vistas. Sometimes you have to take in the flaws to accept the value. Or, as the Cat himself says:

"Keep yourselves to yourselves," said the Maltese Cat to his companions. "We don’t want to rub noses with all those goose-rumped halfbreeds of Upper India. When we’ve won this cup they’ll give their shoes to know us."

 

Worth a look.

Another mystery

The new book Nightmare Scenario limns a gruesome picture of the ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision inside a Trump administration confronted with a pandemic microbe several orders of magnitude better organized and more intelligent:

“One of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no one was in charge of the response,” Abutaleb and Paletta write. “Was it Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync?”

“Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless,” they conclude.

So...wait. We needed a whole book to tell us this?

The choice was to throw in a picture of Trump, or a picture of one of the Scoobies, and, duh, Velma is both way smarter and way-smokin'-hotter, so...

For fuck's sake. This bloated nincompoop pranced around on live television suggesting that the solution to an epidemic pathogen was bleach, shoving lights up your ass, and malaria drugs while ignoring every single piece of public health knowledge about epidemic pathogens developed since the fucking Plague of Athens.

Everyone outside the bubbling MAGAt kool-ade vat knows that the simple stooge couldn't have figured out what he was supposed to do, and if he was told to sit down, shut up, and follow his epidemiologists' instructions how to do it would have just dipped some crap out of his diaper and thrown it at them like the shit-flinging toddler he is.

This is the least-difficult mystery that Scoobies ever solved. Trump did it, regardless of where the bug came from or how or why. He was told that a deadly pathogen was coming - by the damn Chinese premier, forgawdssake, so it wasn't like the guy didn't know what he was talking about - and he was too shit-scared that his rating would tank to actually do what the South Koreans did.

The problem here doesn't seem to be that there's no way to tell how these things happened or who was responsible. Instead it's more magical thinking; I don't WANT it to be that way, so I won't believe it.

Speaking of the whole "where it came from",question related to this magical thinking is the whole "Wuhan lab leak COVID genesis" thing.

Frankly, it isn't something I'm particularly spun up about. We know that biolabs have killed people before...but so have - a lot more often - zoonotic pathogens. The chance that this is an intentional PRC bioweapon are vanishingly slim. For one thing, you develop the vaccine FIRST, so you don't end up killing shitloads of your own troops (Unit 731 is holding on Line 2...) with your own pathogen. For another, a bioweapon that kills old, sick people and is usually ineffective against healthy young ones? Not much of a weapon.

No. The probability is that this is just another in the long line of zoonotic South Asian pathogens in the great SARS/MERS/seasonal flu tradition.

But. Even if it's not, even if this is something that was cooked up by the tricksy Chinamen, that doesn't tell the story the MAGAts want it to.

Because a lab leak doesn't mean we get to sling a nuke at the PRC. Or even fight one of those good and easy-to-win trade wars against them.

For because the world is bound with strands of aircraft aluminum and kerosene aviation fuel it means that it's in our interests to ensure that we 1) know as much as possible about what's going on in Chinese biolabs, and 2) ensure that those labs are as well-designed, well-equipped, well-trained, and well- managed as possible. It means more, closer engagement with the loathsome government of the PRC, not less.

Well...dammit.

When it comes down to cases, I think we're seeing here the functional end of what happens when humans are confronted with difficult, complex, frightening things, especially when the hardscape around those things point towards conclusions those humans dread and fear.

If working through that country forces you to agree to and believe things that you hate with all your heart...it will make you happier not to believe them. If you can settle on a simple, clear answer - even a simple, clear wrong answer - that backs up your hopes and beliefs?

You'll go with that.

Problem?

Climates and pathogens and armed men don't care what you want to believe. If you get them wrong they'll kill you and all yours deader'n shit.

Governing yourself by whatever stupid thing you want to believe?

That's a real good way to make that happen.

A Mess of Pottage

 

The U.S. Congress has, in the usual scatterbrained and dysfunctional way that body seems to work, taken up the issue of repealing the 2002 "Authorization to Use Military Force" that was the legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the mess-o-potamia that followed.

I trust that no one who regularly visits this place has forgotten the appalling clusterfuck that resulted from that cynical bit of Great Power stupidity, so it's obvious on its face that it is time and past time to flush the boneheaded and dangerous thing, full of more lies than nuts in a fruitcake, and I wish they'd 86 the 2001. 9/11, version while they're at it.

The notion of having a political rule just lying around that provides any U.S. government who wishes the "legal" authority to start throwing projectiles around the globe seems dangerously stupid. It's not like illegality will stop a cabal that wishes to do that, but to give them a sort of real-life "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu'il a fait."?

That 's a Bad Idea.

Both of the 2000's AUMFs are Bad Ideas spawned by my country's weird and ugly combination of geopolitical hubris and laziness, the sort of mindless aggressive response to any sort of provocation that makes every problem a nail to be militarily hammered.

It's unfortunate that the mindset that produced them cannot also be repealed. But at the very least - given the lessons that the mindless ruin and merciless hatred that the two have spawned should have taught us - these two loaded guns need to be unloaded.

We'll see if there's enough political sanity left in the U.S. capitol to do that.

Whoa-oh-oh, it's magic!

  

In my other avatar (soccer punditry on the topic of Portland's women's soccer team, the Thorns, and you can read that stuff here if you have a mind to; it's under "Thorns FC:", it's good stuff, and there's not even a subscription fee, so, go, read!) I've been constantly running into this person who is violently opposed to the way the U.S. women's soccer is set up.

Because, you see, it screws over the players; the ur-scream about this comes together in a piece entitled Drafted and Shafted: Life in the NWSL in the online magazine Twentytwo.

And here's the thing about that; yes. I totally agree. 

The way American women's soccer is set up, the rules under which it operates, is designed to keep player salaries low, in much the same way that the rest of the U.S.'s economic life is designed to keep a thumb on the pay scale of everyone outside the C-suite.

But in the National Women's Soccer League the thumb is brutally visible because there's a side-by-side comparison that isn't as brutal to the players, and that's the big European women's leagues; the English FAWSL, the French D1F...in fact, most of the European leagues work very differently from the one here.

And I keep pounding on her about that. The primary reason that the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different is because the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different. 

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

The European leagues came together through a long period of accretion, and the primary factors that dictates their forms, and drives their economics, are 1) the ubiquitous nature of soccer in Europe, and 2) the promotion-relegation system.

Europe is soccerland.

Across the continent no sport is as popular, no sport is as rich, as soccer. That's where the money is. That's where the best athletes go. That's where the fans are.

There's a huge pot of cash sloshing around there...and...there's about a gajillion teams sucking it in.

Because the other part is that there's no way for some Richie Rich to "create" a team out of nothing. There's no empty place waiting for soccer; every little town and city has its own team playing in whatever league it plays in, from the megalopolis - usually the capitals - where there may be half a dozen huge clubs, to the tiny little villages where the baker is the goalie and the local gigalo is the star striker. 

There's no way for a team to come into a soccer league by "expansion" the way, say, American hockey or baseball or football leagues "expand".

So what you do, if you're a Russian criminal oligarch or a grubby Tuscan plutocrat or an Emirati oil sheik looking for secondhand sporting glory, is you buy into an existing team and turn on the firehose of money to buy good players and fancy facilities and take advantage of "promotion"; the system where if you finish on top of your little podunk-y league you move up to the next bigger one.

And up, and up, until finally you're in whatever your country calls your top flight, "Premier League" or whatever.

And then you keep splashing out the cash to win trophies (and money from broadcast fees and endorsements and everything that goes with being a Big Side) and get spots in "Europe"; the UEFA Champions League that brings you even more money.

One problem with this - for the sheiks and oligarchs - is that there's a downside - "relegation".

Your team has a shitty year? Down you go! Back to the second division, where your TV money is less and your endorsements are crappy and you're out of "Europe". If you're really unlucky you might have to sell your good players to cover expenses. You might go out of business! It's rare, but it's happened.

And the other downside is that because there's no league-wide rules on pay for any of these leagues...you're in an open bidding war with the other owners for those good players. You have to pay them the heavens and the Earth. The last figures I read suggested that a typical US soccer team in Major League Soccer passes on something like 40-50% of the revenues in the form of salaries, while a typical top flight English club (a Premier League team) has to pay out something like 70-80% to the players.

The recent attempt by the big European clubs to form a "Super League" was largely about changing all that.

The idea was to create a structure more like American sports. No promotion or relegation, no risk of losing out on the big paydays. What do you bet that the next step for the SuperLeague would have been a pay cap?

 

Right now, the way they're set up, the European leagues are good for the players, not-bad for the owners and the league, and not all that great for the fans.

Outside of their passion for their clubs, a lot of French and British and Italian fans will tell you about the way those clubs, desperate for money, strip-mine their wallets. Punitive ticket prices. Broadcast rights - many of the biggest E.U. clubs have set up their own streaming channels that you have to pay for if you want to see the away matches. You're gouged on matchdays and away days both.

We do things differently here in the U.S.

Here things are set up for the owners (well...sorta except in Major League Baseball, where the owners were too stupid to realize that the Reserve Clause was a fiction until the Messersmith Case tore down the free agency wall and set the players loose upon them. But the collusion the baseball owners replied to Messersmith with shows that they haven't given up trying to regain the whip hand over those damned players, and though MLB doesn't have a hard cap it has a "luxury tax" that tries to do the same thing).

Every other U.S. league has a hard cap. Every league restricts free agency in some form. Every league has a "draft" system by which players are brought in not through negotiations between the player and all the clubs in the league but through a system that funnels players at the drafting clubs. Every league is a closed system into which new clubs can come only through "expansion" - meaning cash on the nail.

That puts the players behind the owners in line for the lolly, which sucks for the players.

It also puts the fans in a weird position; dependent on the largesse of the owners for a way to be there to support the professional team of their choice. Their ticket prices don't depend as much on the paydays of the players as the profits of the club. And there's the problem of access; unless your city has a rich person who wants your sport in that city...you don't have it. Most U.S. leagues prevent fan ownership of professional sports clubs in that league.

IT also kind of sucks for the fans because the relatively low pay in the U.S. soccer leagues is a big incentive for the best soccer players - who have the option that the baseball and football and basketball players don't, of going outside the U.S. for a bigger paycheck - to leave the U.S. teams and fans behind for greener playing fields.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because in my conversations with this person they kept crying out with anger at the way the U.S. women players were being screwed and demanded that change to the way the European leagues work.

And I kept repeating that to change the way the players got paid you'd have to change the way the U.S. leagues work to the European model, and that was exactly what the people who controlled the league didn't want and wouldn't allow, so that this person might as well demand that we all get rich, be cute, and get a pony. 

Nice idea, not gonna happen.

And that as a fan this person might also want to be careful what they wished for, because if that change that isn't gonna happen DID happen the competition within U.S. women's soccer league would also very likely change to what the way the competition in the European leagues work, or, more accurately doesn't work; a tiny handful of top clubs bankrolled by criminal oligarchs and plutocrats and oil sheiks would win all the time, and a collection of impoverished tomato cans would constantly lose to the rich fatcats.

In the top French women's league the fatcat is Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, owned by some plutocrat named Aulas. This outfit has won their league fourteen years - fourteen fucking years - in a row (their rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, finally kicked them off the top step this past season to stop them going to fifteen) and that's not uncommon.

So alongside the chance that such a change would be financially good for the players but not the fans, the chance that such a change would be also not be good for the fans of most of the clubs who want their clubs to actually win something worth a shit is pretty high.

We bang on about this every time the subject comes up, every time we do I say all these things, and every time it makes absolutely no impression on this person. 

They insist that the magical solution is just to change things! Change things! Then everything - for owners, players, fans - will be better! Change is better! Just change things in the U.S. women's league to be more like Europe that in some magical way can totally just happen regardless of the social and political and economic differences and the utterly incompatible priors and all.

Not only can't I convince them that the change they're demanding aren't just improbable but impossible...but that if they could happen they might not be good for them. Good for the players, good for the league, good for the owners...but not for them.

They are completely certain that the something they want is both just a matter of wanting to do it bad enough and when it happens it will make the magic and everything will be better for everyone.

And the reason I went through all this?

Is because I'm seeing more and more of this sort of magical thinking on all kinds of subjects other than soccer.

Climate change?

Even if you don't slam head-on into the Great Wall of Republican Stupid, there's a crap-ton of people, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, that somehow think that we can have the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum without changing our Netflix viewing habits.

The idea seems to be that somehow we'll all magically be juuuuuust fine when the oceans rise three feet. The idea that our Pacific Northwest forests might burn? Yeah, well...ummm...

A third of our citizenry refuses to be vaccinated against a global pandemic? Sure! That'll be fine!

Allowing private equity execs the freedom to further advance the Second Gilded Age? Sure! What could go wrong?

Auditing votes all over hell? Sure! That'll Stop The Steal, which is totally a thing, and just needs the right magic and you people will see!

Look.

I get it. I mean, religions are concrete proof that humans ever since Olduvai indulge in vast amounts of magical thinking. It's not that I don't understand that people still cling to seeing the world around them as what they want it to be.

But, silly me, I thought that the whole point of the Enlightenment and the primacy of the hard sciences was an indication that the practical alternative to all this magical thinking was actual observation-analysis-deduction-conclusion. That the point of universal education was to make the vast majority of us comfortable with the idea that we don't have to believe in "belief"; that we can examine physical conditions and evidence draw the most-logical inferences from them.

But apparently not.

The problem here is that in the 14th Century us humans had a lot less raw physical power. We could change things; cut down trees, dig canals, build cities...but only to a fairly limited extent.

Now?

Christ, we can destroy ourselves and our planet if we choose to with the push of some buttons.

We're insanely far above and beyond the global Apex Predator. We're an unstoppable force. We're the gajillion-pound gorilla. We're on track to change everything from our climate to our ecology, and we seem unable to get past the way we thought 10,000 years ago when thunder was a message from the gods, in everything from soccer to social order.

That's...probably not good.

Boyz to men...

So this week the Boy jumped the low bar that is U.S. high school graduation.

I don't want to low-rate him. He did what he needed to do, so good on him.

The difficulty is...what now?

A high school diploma is the bottom-line of any sort of employment. He's not going anywhere exciting with that. And he's gone nowhere outside ten miles of his North Portland home for eighteen years. He has no idea what's out there.

The saddest part was that after his graduation, while his pals were hugging and taking selfies, he was walking home, alone, with his mom and sister and me tagging along behind,

I honestly don't know what to do.

He's going to do whats he's going to do, and I have no idea how to change that.

H-Plus-40,471,200

Seventy-seven years ago last night one of my old units, the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment went out the C-47 doors into the dark over northwestern France.

When you look at the record the 505th has been a pretty hard-luck unit.

In Sicily the green pilots of Air Transport Command and the inexperienced Allied commanders didn't think what the high wind over the south shore of the island might do to a night drop of a cherry outfit and scattered the 505th all over hell.

After getting hammered in Sicily the 505th jumped into the Salerno beachhead; the 505th missed the nightmare that had been the German attack two days earlier but spent the rest of 1943 grinding up the Italian peninsula and getting ground up in the process.

The plan for the Normandy drop was for the '05 to take and hold the town of St. Mere Eglise. 

 

As you can see from the map, this village was a chokepoint for roads both leading to Utah Beach as well as the high-speed lateral route along the shore. So nailing it down was pretty critical.

Well, as it seemed typical with those WW2 jumps, the real thing looked nothing like the plan.

See the little black dots? Each one is a "stick", a C-47-load of GIs. The biggest cluster is actually pretty damn close to the DZ, mind, which isn't bad given the darkness and the flak, but look at the other big cluster just to the left of the oval. See the gray hatch pattern where those guys landed?

That's the valley of a tributary of the Douve River that the Germans had flooded knowing that the Allies were damn likely to throw some paratroops at them. My guess is that the WW2 guys had a "water landing" gimmick just like we had in the Eighties, but just like ours it was a whole lot more likely to work in calm daylight training than in a night full of chaos and antiaircraft fire.

A lot of guys from my old outfit never made it out of the swamp.

Enough did, though, to take the town and win the war.

The '05 got stuck into the mess that was The Bridge Too Far, as well, and then had a rough winter on the northern side of the "Bulge".

After the Big War the '05 did the usual sorts of imperial grunt work, including - alone of the 82nd, Vietnam - and has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, where continuing in the hard-luck tradition the 1st Battalion drew the Fallujah short straw.

I can't find a listing of how many of the guys who went out the doors that night are still around. Probably not too many, and those have to be in their nineties, so they're going to be gone, too, before too long. 

So I'm not sure there's a larger lesson to this one, other than "fucked up things happen in wartime", and that's been true since Thucydides' day.

But I guess the point is; here's to the boys of the 505th.

Who's like us?

Damn few, and they're all dead.

Still here

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.

Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.

I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.

Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...

...except for this one:

This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come". 

The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.

So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.

Who knew?

Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.

Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?

Here's some cat pictures.

That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.

Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.

Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.

Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.

They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.

I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.

Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.