Wayward Landlubber

Most nights I sit with my cat in my lap as I scroll through the political offerings on YouTube. I have a TV, but I gave up trying to figure out how it works without cable. Thats how old i am. Like most things media, there are good Podcasts, and there are guys in muscle shirts. There are also historical snippets among the hysterical snippets. Some of them are very good and the narrators successfully run the gamet between professorial and subtle irony. Few are boring. It's not hard to tell the difference. The most disappointing historical snippets are the ones with digitally created voice-overs.  I used to know a fellow who was a pretty good actor, no one you would know, but one who strode the boards of local theater groups with characters that were believable; the aim of every actor. When I met Doug, he had been at it for about 10 years, after mustering out of the airforce at the end of the Cuba missile crisis. He completed his acting career in 2005 when his twenty-year battle with ...

There's an ancient tome studied by military colleges around the world, and by people who study peace. The Art of War was written sometime in the 5th Century--BCE. The author was Sun Tzu. He was a general but not your ordinary kind of general. He was great enough to be studied 2500 years later. One of his stories on proper generalship during war was about a great army, maybe 10,000 strong, marching on the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Great armies make noise, in the 5th Century BC, the noise they made was a distinctive noise to a trained ear. There's of course the rythmic stomp of marching feet on cobblestone streets. The occasional drop of a spear, maybe. The noise of wagons to carry the manual implements of war, and the food to feed them, voices of men commanding, and there was the slap of leather on leather as the soldiers moved briskly through the broad plaza. How do you enter the city undetected was the problem? The solution was to drive gaggles of geese before them. The gees...

I, and some of my Marion County Democratic  colleagues have a table outside the Farmers Market on Saturdays, where we sell buttons and make a strong presence against the most incompetent presidential administration in our entire history. Not surprisingly, this same administration is also massively corrupt. Corruption and incompetence are connected. One accompanies the other as tightly as two snakes mating. It makes sense. Under corruption, where insiders compete to get inside the Boss's colon, people do not last long enough to get experienced. The rewards of our weekly ritual at Saturday Market are personal and gratifying. I love seeing someone crack a smile or give a thumbs-up as they pass by. By contrast, there are the very occasional MAGA. Some are brave enough to express themselves openly. Others say something as they pass by, like squeaking out a fart in the grocery store and quickly disappearing. Sometimes I get a quick word in. This is to the woman who ended her fart salad o...