Month: March 2025

Corcyra Again

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I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet.  But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while.  Well, patience is a virtue.

I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today.  It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.”  I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States.  It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.

And all of that was good stuff.  But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.”  And that always holds my interest.  It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines.  He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state.  All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia.  I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.

What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra.  Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra.  And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.

“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”

It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not.  The last time was October of 2017.  And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building.  It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”

But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor.  That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here.  I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living.  Well, that enough.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 07MAR2025 – Turkey Trot

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war pig

 

They run through the woods in a flock like a small stampede, making a lot of noise. I was squirrel hunting before turkey season. I was sitting on a fallen log in full camouflage with a ..22 rifle. I heard a flock approach and saw them coming my way. I waited until they were close, took off my hat with camouflage face net, stood up, waved my arms and shouted at them. Pandemonium. They ran in all directions, some flying, hitting trees, and falling to ground before taking off on foot. I laughed until my sides ached. If it had been turkey season, I’d have taken two of the toms or jakes. In fact I returned to the area in season and took two single toms . Wild turkey is much better than farm raised, just as I prefer wild rabbit to tame rabbit. Wild turkey giblets make the very best gravy.

Wish Me Luck

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Tonight, I asked Camera Girl what she thought I should write my post about.  She said I should write about the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t have a pet dog.  I countered, “But he doesn’t like dogs.”  She said that was weak and that if he got a dog, he’d be much more likely to succeed as president.  Well, what can I say?  She’s got me there.  Of course, exactly what kind of dog would be compatible with Donald Trump seems like a very complicated question.  Well, he’s kind of tall.  Maybe a Great Dane.  I explained to her that it’s sort of a moot question because Trump’s not going to change his mind at this point in his life.  Well, she rejected this explanation and stood by the idea that this situation spelled disaster for his presidency.  Oh well, agree to disagree.

Yesterday I sent a proposal for my unfinished novel to Ark Press to see if they are interested in this soon to be blockbuster story.  It’s almost twenty-four hours since I hit the send button on the e-mail and I’ve heard nothing.  As you can imagine, I’m crushed and dejected by the interminable delay.  I now question my optimism and see all of life as a hollow husk of what my hopes and dreams were.  I was planning on tying a lead weight to my ankle and tossing it into the pond thus ending it all.  But I realized the water depth is currently about three feet so it could take a long while to perish.  I need a better plan.

Plan B is to start a new career.  Currently the top contender is bare-knuckle-boxer.  My plan is to begin an intensive physical conditioning program.  I’ll start with road work and then add on a raw egg diet and finally I’ll find a good manager someone named Mick or Apollo or something like that.  I figure if I play my cards right, I’ll be ready for a title fight sometime in 2026 which being the 250th birthday of the United States will be sorta like what happened for Rocky Balboa only without the turtles named Bert and Ernie.  I told Camera Girl about my plan and she punched me in the stomach really hard.  It was sort of a foul.  I wasn’t expecting it after all.  But it really has affected my confidence.  I complained that, “Adrian never punched Rocky or did anything to discourage him from becoming the boxing champion of the world and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”  She countered that Adrain was a doofus and Rocky was too short to be an effective boxer.  I reminded her that we saw the movie back in 1976 and she never said anything about those things back then.  She replied that she was still attempting to trap me into matrimony at that point so she let it ride for then.  But she claimed that she always thought Adrian was a doofus.  And as her final point she opined that boxers need very strong neck muscles and I have a bad neck.  Her point was that modern boxers hit so hard that my head would fly off my body after one punch and that would be gross.  Well, that was food for thought.

So, I guess I need a Plan C.  I haven’t really worked out all the details but maybe, possibly, I’m going to go pro in pickle ball.  I’ve heard good things.  But I haven’t bounced it off her yet.  Wish me luck.

The Sesquarcentennial Man

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Today is my regular Wednesday zoom call with the boys and of course we were hooting about last night’s speech.  Everyone loved the hilarious jabs at Biden, the endless list of billion-dollar boondoggles cut from USAID and Trump’s droll braggadocio of his list of accomplishments.  But I think I had them laughing hardest when I reminded them of the three hundred- and fifty-year-old social security recipient.  I thought a couple of them were going to have a stroke or swallow their tongues.  I think everyone inherently senses how this absurdity just encapsulates what runaway bureaucracy looks like in its terminal stage.  As Trump said, “This guy is a hundred years older than the country but he’s still on the rolls!”  You have to have a kind of primal respect for someone defending a lie that big.  It’s epic.

Now some would rightly point to the much greater financial impact of there being many millions of Americans claiming to be alive after 110, 120, 130 and even 140 years of age.  The benefits for millions of people are enormous.  They’re in the tens of billions of dollars.  They are an outrage and they should be crimes that are rooted out and punished.  Even the people just working in the social security department and ignoring the absurdity of these impossible ages should be punished.

And yet I can’t help but hearken back the Sesquarcentennial Man.  So that means he was born in 1675 AD.  Isaac Newton and Louis XIV of France were still alive back then.  In that year King Philip’s War broke out, as the Wampanoags attacked Swansea, Massachusetts.  Maybe Sesquarcentennial Man remembers the trauma of those frightening days.  Maybe he still requires medication to deal with the fear.  But whatever else we can say about him the most important characteristic he possesses is that we’re still paying for him.  And without Elon Musk we probably would continue to pay for him until the US Treasury finally closes its doors and goes out of business.

So yeah, we got a hoot out of it and thank you Donald Trump for your love of comedy.  But the real point is that the federal government is filled with people making six figure salaries while ignoring the apparently endless incompetence and corruption going on all around them with no concern for how it impacts their fellow Americans or the country as a whole.

Well, I think it just hardens our resolve to see DOGE fire as many of these useless and despicable individuals as is humanly possible.  We should want to see the number of federal employees reduced to the bare minimum possible through the use of automation and continuous improvement of the systems and processes needed to perform the critical functions of the government.  And by eliminating all non-essential functions of government.  No more research studies into fields that the government has no business funding.  If anyone has an unquenchable curiosity about the sex lives of any animal (including humans) let him pay for that voyeuristic pursuit out of his own pocket.  And likewise for every other pseudoscientific time sink.  Fund yourselves.

But more than anything else, I want to know about Sesquarcentennial Man.  Who is (or was) he?  How many descendants has he?  And most urgently, who’s cashing his social security checks.  Elon, can you help us out here?