Memes that made me laugh 81

 

Gathered from here and there over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

This morning I'm sharing with you a fun live concert by Golden Earring from 2007.  The entire concert is here, if you'd like to listen to over an hour of their music:  but I'd like to highlight this extended 19-minute version of their classic rock hit "Radar Love".  For those who only ever heard the short, commercially-played version, it's an eye-opener.

Fun stuff from veteran rockers.  It was sad to hear, earlier this year, that they've finally closed up shop after guitarist George Kooymans was diagnosed with ALS.

Peter

Saturday Snippet: The trials and tribulations of collecting pythons

 

The late Gerald Durrell, whom we've met in these pages before, was a British naturalist, animal collector and zoo-keeper who did more for the conservation and preservation of wildlife around the world than almost anyone else of his era.

He wrote many books about his experiences, which have become beloved of readers for a couple of generations now (I grew up on a steady diet of them).  One of them described his second visit to Bafut in what was then British Cameroon (today divided between Nigeria and the Republic of Cameroon).  It was titled "A Zoo In My Luggage".

We've already used one excerpt from that book in a previous Saturday Snippet;  and I used an (side-splittingly funny) tale from an earlier book, "The Bafut Beagles", about his first visit to Bafut, in a Saturday Snippet a couple of years ago.

Here's Durrell's account of trying to collect a massive python from a West African cave.

I sent messages to all my old contacts among the local hunters, gathered them together and told them the sort of creatures we were after. Then we sat back and awaited results. They were some time in coming. Then, early one afternoon, a local hunter called Agustine appeared, padding down the drive, wearing a scarlet-and-blue sarong and looking, as always, like a neat, eager, Mongolian shopwalker. He was accompanied by one of the largest West Africans I have ever seen, a great, scowling man who must have been at least six feet tall, and whose skin – in contrast to Agustine’s golden bronze shade – was a deep soot black. He clumped along beside Agustine on such enormous feet that at first I thought he was suffering from elephantiasis. They stopped at the verandah steps, and while Agustine beamed cheerily, his companion glared at us in a preoccupied manner, as though endeavouring to assess our net weight for culinary purposes.

‘Good morning, sah,’ said Agustine, giving a twist to his highly-coloured sarong to anchor it more firmly round his slim hips.

‘Good morning, sah,’ intoned the giant, his voice sounding like the distant rumble of thunder.

‘Good morning … you bring beef?’ I inquired hopefully, though they did not appear to be carrying any animals.

‘No, sah,’ said Agustine sorrowfully, ‘we no get beef. I come to ask Masa if Masa go borrow us some rope.’

‘Rope? What do you want rope for?’

‘We done find some big boa, sah, for bush. But we no fit catch um if we no get rope, sah.’

Bob, whose speciality was reptiles, sat up with a jerk. ‘Boa?’ he said excitedly. ‘What does he mean … boa?’

‘They mean a python,’ I explained. One of the most confusing things about pidgin English, from the naturalist’s point of view, was the number of wrong names used for various animals. Pythons were boas, leopards were tigers and so on. Bob’s eyes gleamed with a fanatical light. Ever since we had boarded the ship at Southampton his conversation had been almost entirely confined to pythons, and I knew that he would not be really happy until he had added one of these reptiles to the collection.

‘Where is it?’ he asked, his voice quivering with ill-concealed eagerness.

‘’E dere dere for bush,’ said Agustine, waving a vague arm that embraced approximately five hundred square miles of forest. ‘’E dere dere for some hole inside ground.’

‘Na big one?’ I asked.

‘Wah! Big?’ exclaimed Agustine. ‘’E big too much.’

‘’E big like dis,’ said the giant, slapping his thigh which was about the size of a side of beef.

‘We walka for bush since morning time, sah,’ explained Agustine. ‘Den we see dis boa. We run quick-quick, but we no catch lucky. Dat snake get power too much. ’E done run for some hole for ground and we no get rope so we no fit catch um.’

‘You done leave some man for watch dis hole,’ I asked, ‘so dis boa no go run for bush?’

‘Yes, sah, we done lef’ two men for dere.’

I turned to Bob. ‘Well, here’s your chance: a genuine wild python holed up in a cave. Shall we go and have a shot at it?’

‘God, yes! Let’s go and get it right away,’ exclaimed Bob.

I turned to Agustine. ‘We go come look dis snake, Agustine, eh?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘You go wait small time and we go come. First we get rope and catch net.’

While Bob hurried out to our pile of equipment to fetch rope and nets, I filled a couple of bottles with water and rounded up Ben, our animal boy, who was squatting outside the back door, flirting with a damsel of voluptuous charms.

‘Ben, leave that unfortunate young woman alone and get ready. We’re going for bush to catch a boa.’

‘Yes, sah,’ said Ben, reluctantly leaving his girl friend. ‘Which side dis boa, sah?’

‘Agustine say it’s in a hole for ground. That’s why I want you. If this hole is so small that Mr Golding and I no fit pass you will have to go for inside and catch the boa.’

‘Me, sah?’ said Ben.

‘Yes, you. All alone.’

‘All right,’ he said, grinning philosophically. ‘I no de fear, sah.’

‘You lie,’ I said. ‘You know you de fear too much.’

‘I no de fear, for true, sah,’ said Ben in a dignified manner. ‘I never tell Masa how I done kill bush-cow?’

‘Yes, you told me twice, and I still don’t believe you. Now, go to Mr Golding and get the ropes and catch nets. Hurry.’

. . .

The path lay at first through some old native farmland, where the giant trees had been felled and now lay rotting across the ground. Between these trunks a crop of cassava had been grown and harvested, and the ground allowed to lie fallow, so that the low growth of the forest – thorn bushes, convolvulus and other tangles – had swept into the clearing and covered everything with a cloak. There was always plenty of life to be seen in these abandoned farms, and as we pushed through the intricate web of undergrowth there were birds all around us. Beautiful little flycatchers hovered in the air, showing up powder-blue against the greenery; in the dim recesses of convolvulus-covered tree stumps robin-chats hopped perkily in search of grasshoppers, and looked startlingly like English robins; a pied crow flew up from the ground ahead and flapped heavily away, crying a harsh warning; in a thicket of thorn bushes, covered with pink flowers among which zoomed big blue bees, a kurrichane thrush treated us to a waterfall of sweet song. The path wound its way through this moist, hot, waist-high undergrowth for some time, and then quite abruptly the undergrowth ended and the path led us out on to a golden grassfield, rippling with the heat haze.

Attractive though they were to look at, these grassfields were far from comfortable to walk across. The grass was tough and spiky, growing in tussocks carefully placed to trip the unwary traveller. In places, where sheets of grey rocks were exposed to the sun, the surface, sprinkled with a million tiny mica chips, sparkled and flashed in your eyes. The sun beat down upon your neck, and its reflections rebounded off the glittering surface of the rock and hit you in the face with the impact of a blast furnace. We plodded across this sun-drenched expanse, the sweat pouring off us.

‘I hope this damned reptile’s had the sense to go to ground where there’s some shade,’ I said to Bob. ‘You could fry an egg on these rocks.’

Agustine, who had been padding eagerly ahead, his sarong turning from scarlet to wine-red as it absorbed the sweat from his body, turned and grinned at me, his face freckled with a mass of sweat-drops.

‘Masa hot?’ he inquired anxiously.

‘Yes, hot too much,’ I answered, ‘’e far now dis place?’

‘No, sah,’ he said pointing ahead, ‘’e dere dere … Masa never see dis man I done leave for watch?’

I followed his pointing finger and in the distance I could see an area where the rocks had been pushed up and rumpled, like bedclothes, by some ancient volcanic upheaval, so that they formed a miniature cliff running diagonally across the grassfield. On top of this I could see the figures of two more hunters, squatting patiently in the sun. When they saw us they rose to their feet and waved ferocious-looking spears in greeting.

‘’E dere dere for hole?’ yelled Agustine anxiously.

‘’E dere dere,’ they called back.

When we reached the base of the small cliff I could quite see why the python had chosen this spot to stand at bay. The rock face had been split into a series of shallow caves, worn smooth by wind and water, each communicating with the other, and the whole series sloping slightly upwards into the cliff, so that anything that lived in them would be in no danger of getting drowned in the rainy season. The mouth of each cave was about eight feet across and three feet high, which gave a snake, but not much else, room for manoeuvring. The hunters had very thoughtfully set fire to all the grass in the vicinity, in an effort to smoke the reptile out. The snake had been unaffected by this, but now we had to work in a thick layer of charcoal and feathery ash up to our ankles.

Bob and I got down on our stomachs and, shoulder to shoulder, wormed our way into the mouth of the cave to try and spot the python and map out a plan of campaign. We soon found that the cave narrowed within three or four feet of the entrance so that there was only room for one person, lying as flat as he could. After the glare of the sunshine outside, the cave seemed twice as dark as it was, and we could not see a thing. The only indication that a snake was there at all was a loud peevish hissing every time we moved. We called loudly for a torch, and when this had been unpacked and handed to us we directed its beam up the narrow passage.

Eight feet ahead of us the passage ended in a circular depression in the rock, and in this the python lay coiled, shining in the torchlight as if freshly polished. It was about fifteen feet long as far as we could judge, and so fat that we pardoned Gargantua for comparing its girth with his enormous thigh. It was also in an extremely bad temper. The longer the torch beam played on it the more prolonged and shrill did its hisses become, until they rose to an eerie shriek. We crawled out into the sunlight again and sat up, both of us almost the same colour as our hunters because of the thick layer of dark ash adhering to our sweaty bodies.

‘The thing is to get a noose round its neck, and then we can all pull like hell and drag it out,’ said Bob.

‘Yes, but the job’s going to be to get the noose round its neck. I don’t fancy being wedged in that passage if it decided to come down it after one. There’s no room to manoeuvre, and there’s no room for anyone to help you if you do get entangled with it.’

‘Yes, that’s a point,’ Bob admitted.

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ I said. ‘Agustine, go quick-quick and cut one fork-stick for me … big one … you hear?’

‘Yes, sah,’ said Agustine, and whipping out his broad-bladed machete he trotted off towards the forest’s edge some three hundred yards away.

‘Remember,’ I warned Bob, ‘if we do succeed in yanking it out into the open, you can’t rely on the hunters. Everyone in the Cameroons is convinced that a python is poisonous; not only do they think its bite is deadly, but they also think it can poison you with the spurs under the tail. So if we do get it out it’s no good grabbing the head and expecting them to hang on to the tail. You’ll have to grab one end while I grab the other, and we’ll just have to hope to heaven that they co-operate in the middle.

‘That’s a jolly thought,’ said Bob, sucking his teeth meditatively.

Presently Agustine returned, carrying a long, straight sapling with a fork at one end. On to this forked end I fastened a slip knot with some fine cord which, the manufacturers had assured me, would stand a strain of three hundredweight. Then I unravelled fifty feet or so of the cord, and handed the rest of the coil to Agustine.

‘Now I go for inside, I go try put dis rope for ’e neck, eh? If I go catch ’e neck I go holla, and then all dis hunter man go pull one time. You hear?’

‘I hear, sah.’

‘Now if I should pull,’ I said, as I lowered myself delicately into the carpet of ash, ‘for heaven’s sake don’t let them pull too hard … I don’t want the damn thing pulled on top of me.’

I wriggled slowly up the cave, carrying the sapling and cord with me, the torch in my mouth. The python hissed with undiminished ferocity. Then came the delicate job of trying to push the sapling ahead of me so that I could get the dangling noose over the snake’s head. I found this impossible with the torch in my mouth, for at the slightest movement the beam swept everywhere but on to the point required. I put the torch on the ground, propped it up on some rocks with the beam playing on the snake and then, with infinite care, I edged the sapling up the cave towards the reptile. The python had, of course, coiled itself into a tight knot, with the head lying in the centre of coils, so when I had got the sapling into position I had to force the snake to show its head. The only way of doing this was to prod the creature vigorously with the end of the sapling.

After the first prod the shining coils seemed to swell with rage, and there came echoing down the cave a hiss so shrill and so charged with malignancy that I almost dropped the sapling. Grasping the wood more firmly in my sweaty hand I prodded again, and was treated to another shrill exhalation of breath. Five times I prodded before my efforts were rewarded. The python’s head appeared suddenly over the top of the coils, and swept towards the end of the sapling, the mouth wide open and gleaming pinkly in the torchlight. But the movement was so sudden that I had no chance to get the noose over its head. The snake struck three times, and each time I made ineffectual attempts to noose it. My chief difficulty was that I could not get close enough; I was working at the full stretch of my arm, and this, combined with the weight of the sapling, made my movements very clumsy. At last, dripping with sweat, my arms aching, I crawled out into the sunlight.

‘It’s no good,’ I said to Bob. ‘It keeps its head buried in its coils and only pops it out to strike … you don’t get a real chance to noose it.’

‘Let me have a go,’ he said eagerly.

He seized the sapling and crawled into the cave. There was a long pause during which we could only see his large feet scrabbling and scraping for a foothold in the cave entrance. Presently he reappeared, cursing fluently.

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We’ll never get it with this.’

‘If they get us a forked stick like a shepherd’s crook do you think you could get hold of a coil and pull it out?’ I inquired.

‘I think so,’ said Bob, ‘or at any rate I could probably make it uncoil so we can get a chance at the head.’

So Agustine was once more dispatched to the forest with minute instructions as to the sort of stick we needed, and he soon returned with a twenty-foot branch at one end of which was a fish-hook-like projection.

‘If you could crawl in with me and shine the torch over my shoulder, it would help,’ said Bob. ‘If I put it on the ground, I knock it over every time I move.’

So we crawled into the cave together and lay there, wedged shoulder to shoulder. While I shone the torch down the tunnel, Bob slowly edged his gigantic crook towards the snake. Slowly, so as not to disturb the snake unnecessarily, he edged the hook over the top coil of the mound, settled it in place, shuffled his body into a more comfortable position and then hauled with all his strength.

The results were immediate and confusing. To our surprise the entire bulk of the snake – after a momentary resistance – slid down the cave towards us. Exhilarated, Bob shuffled backwards (thus wedging us both more tightly in the tunnel) and hauled again. The snake slid still nearer and then started to unravel. Bob hauled again, and the snake uncoiled still farther; its head and neck appeared out of the tangle and struck at us. Wedged like a couple of outsize sardines in an undersized can we had no room to move except backwards, and so we slid backwards on our stomachs as rapidly as we could. At last, to our relief, we reached a slight widening in the passage, and this allowed us more room to manoeuvre. Bob laid hold of the sapling and pulled at it grimly. He reminded me of a lanky and earnest blackbird tugging an outsize worm from its hole. The snake slid into view, hissing madly, its coils shuddering with muscular contraction as it tried to free itself of the hook round its body. Another good heave, I calculated, and Bob would have it at the mouth of the cave. I crawled out rapidly.

‘Bring dat rope,’ I roared to the hunters, ‘quick … quick … rope.’

They leapt to obey as Bob appeared at the cave mouth, scrambled to his feet and stepped back for the final jerk that would drag the snake out into the open where we could fall on it. But, as he stepped back, he put his foot on a loose rock which twisted under him, and he fell flat on his back. The sapling was jerked from his hands, the snake gave a mighty heave that freed its body from the hook, and, with the smooth fluidity of water soaking into blotting-paper it slid into a crack in the cave wall that did not look as though it could accommodate a mouse. As the last four feet of its length were disappearing into the bowels of the earth, Bob and I fell on it and hung on like grim death. We could feel the rippling of the powerful muscles as the snake, buried deep in the rocky cleft, struggled to break our grip on its tail. Slowly, inch by inch, the smooth scales slipped through our sweaty hands, and then, suddenly, the snake was gone. From somewhere deep in the rocks came a triumphant hiss.

Covered with ash and charcoal smears, our arms and legs scraped raw, our clothes black with sweat, Bob and I sat and glared at each other, panting for breath. We were past speech.

‘Ah, ’e done run, Masa,’ pointed out Agustine, who seemed to have a genius for underlining the obvious.

‘Dat snake ’e get power too much,’ observed Gargantua moodily.

‘No man fit hold dat snake for inside hole,’ said Agustine, attempting to comfort us.

‘’E get plenty, plenty power,’ intoned Gargantua again, ‘’e get power pass man.’

In silence I handed round the cigarettes and we squatted in the carpet of ash and smoked.

‘Well,’ I said at last, philosophically, ‘we did the best we could. Let’s hope for better luck next time.’

Bob, however, refused to be comforted. To have had the python of his dreams so close to capture and then to lose it was almost almost more than he could bear. He prowled around, muttering savagely to himself, as we packed up the nets and ropes, and then followed us moodily as we set off homewards.

The sun was now low in the sky, and by the time we had crossed the grassfield and entered the abandoned farmland a greenish twilight had settled on the world. Everywhere in the moist undergrowth giant glow-worms gleamed and shuddered like sapphires, and through the warm air fireflies drifted, pulsating briefly like pink pearls against the dark undergrowth. The air was full of the evening scents, wood smoke, damp earth, the sweet smell of blossom already wet with dew. An owl called in an ancient, trembling voice, and another answered it.

The river was like a moving sheet of bronze in the twilight as we scrunched our way across the milk-white sandbank. The old man and the boy were curled up asleep in the bows of the canoe. They awoke, and in silence paddled us down the dark river. On the hill top, high above us, we could see the lamps of the house shining out, and faintly, as a background to the swish and gurgle of our paddles, we could hear the gramophone playing. A drift of small white moths enveloped the canoe as it headed towards the bank. The moon, very fragile and weak, was edging its way up through the filigree of the forest behind us, and once more the owls called, sadly, longingly, in the gloom of the trees.

Having meandered around that part of the world once in a while, I can attest to the searing heat and humidity of West Africa (it's near the equator).  It can be so humid that, if one exerts oneself and is panting for breath, it feels almost like trying to breathe water.  Definitely not my favorite sensation!

Peter

An insider's perspective on the container bottleneck at California harbors

 

I'm obliged to reader "Ray - SoCal" for sending me the link to an interesting series of tweets by Ryan Petersen about what he saw at the port of Long Beach yesterday, and his suggestions for dealing with the problem.  (He's the CEO of Flexport, a freight forwarding and customs brokerage firm, and therefore speaks with considerable insight.)  The text below is taken from ThreadReader, which consolidates his individual tweets into a text stream.

Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned. 

First off, the boat captain said we were the first company to ever rent his boat to tour the port to see how everything was working up close. His usual business is doing memorial services at sea. He said we were a lot more fun than his regular customers. 

The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded. 

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow. 

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam. 

Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis. 

If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed. 

WIth the yards so full, carriers / terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties. 

Also containers are not fungible between carriers, so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up. This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now (as of 10/21) at his yards. 

This is a trucking company with 6 yards that represents 153 owner operator drivers, so he has almost 3 containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team. 

He can’t take the containers off the chassis because he’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether. 

With the chassis all tied up storing empties that can't be returned to the port, there are no chassis available to pick up containers at the port. 

And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting off shore. This line is going to get longer not shorter. 

This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy. 

Alright how do we fix this, you ask? Simple. And we can do it fast now, 

When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you. 

You should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. In a port that's the ship to shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they're waiting for another part of the operation to catch up. 

The bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It's yard space at the container terminals. And it's empty chassis to come clear those containers out. 

In operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't design for it to appear, you must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK! 

Here's a simple plan that @POTUS and @GavinNewsom partnered with the private sector, labor, truckers, and everyone else in the chain must implement TODAY to overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate again.

1) Executive order effective immediately overriding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days. 

This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers 

2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days. 

3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex. 

4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port. 

5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. 

This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas. 

We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. 

The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it's getting worse not better every day that goes by. 

I'd be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government if asked. Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point.

Cogent points all.

I'm not sure how practical his proposed solution might be - after all, POTUS and California's Governor simply don't have the authority in law to do what he's proposing, and I'd be wary of giving them that degree of control, because I don't trust professional politicians not to misuse it - but it's a start.

Peter

"Indoctrination into tyranny"

 

That's what the Rutherford Institute calls the slow, steady erosion of our civil liberties and human rights by the "establishment".

Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps: overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit.

No one speaks up for those being targeted.

No one resists these minor acts of oppression.

No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.

. . .

In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial. Yet there is no denying the ugly, hard truths that become more evident with every passing day.

1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
2. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.
3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
4. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
5. Some years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is virtually no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
6. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
7. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance.
8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
9. America’s shadow government—which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now and operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.
10. You no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
11. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
12. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes. Likewise, private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family.
13. We now find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, and “we the people” are losing.
14. All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
15. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
16. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
17. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
18. Finally, freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.

. . .

Evil disguised as bureaucracy is still evil. Indeed, this is what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil ... Such evil prevails when good men and women do nothing.

There's more at the link.

We didn't get here overnight.  It took decades of slow, careful erosion of our rights by "big government" to get here.  The question is now, are we going to continue to tolerate that?  Or are we going to stand firm on what remains of our rights, and resist further erosion?

The progressive left is gambling that we won't;  that we've allowed so much to erode that there isn't enough left for us to stand on.

When I look at how many Americans are going along with the COVID-19 propaganda with which we're being bombarded, and surrendering almost all control over themselves in blind, sheep-like panic . . . I can't help but fear that the progressive left may be right, at least for areas they control.

I guess it's up to those of us who still believe in freedom to fight back;  because, even if we lose, it's the right - and the only - thing to do.  Let us not "go gently into that good night", politically or otherwise.

Peter

It's not a "homeless" crisis - it's a drug crisis

 

Peachy Keenan has written a really good article in American Mind titled "Pass Tents".  She analyzes and explains why the "homeless" crisis is really a drug crisis, particularly crystal meth;  shows how much graft is involved in "managing" and "controlling" the "homeless crisis";  and suggests a way forward (which will never be adopted, partly because it's too logical and rational, and partly because it would eliminate the opportunities for graft and corruption in the present system).

Here's her explanation of the graft involved.

The homeless crisis is fake. By fake I mean, it’s an engineered social dysfunction created on purpose to ensure a steady flow of suitcases stuffed with unmarked nonconsecutive bills to City Halls around the country. It is a racket. A money laundering operation, just like the Department of Defense budget, and almost at the same astronomical scale.

Just like the open border, Covid, and inflation, fake crises are never allowed to go to waste.

Los Angeles voted itself $1.2 billion to “address homelessness” in 2019. The number of homeless people, naturally, shot up from 40,000 to close to 70,000 now. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom pledged $4.8 billion to “address” and “confront” homelessness in the state, where over 150,000 homeless live.

But wait, there’s more! As the recall pressed in on him, he announced an additional $12 billion to “confront” homelessness.

He’s addressing it, you guys! He’s confronting it! 

Liberal politicians understand that homelessness works. Homelessness is good. The more tents the better. The more lunatics who threaten and harass you with their pants around their ankles, the more likely you are to vote for new taxes and more spending.

You see a filth-encrusted hobo nodding out on a curb, urine running down the sidewalk—our leadership class sees cash. 

You see a machete-wielding degenerate with stained pants terrorizing tourists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—a greasy LA city official sees a new tax, a new program, a big pay raise for himself.

There is a reason that LA’s infamous Skid Row has been allowed to fester and grow for almost 40 years. It now spans dozens of blocks in the downtown shopping district of America’s second largest city. It is mile after mile, block after block, of wasted zomboids shuffling past heaps of putrid trash, drug dealers, and pop-up brothels in Porta-Potties. 

It’s a perfect grift, and they don’t care if you know it. 

Thanks to the tsunami of money, in 2020 there was a 12.7 percent rise in homelessness, “despite an increase in the number of people rehoused.” 

I have no clue what “rehoused” means, but I’m guessing it’s a portmanteau of “deloused” and “re-hosed.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles mayoral candidates like Kevin De Leon continue to double down on the clown world policy of Housing First. 

Placing meth and heroin addicts in shiny new apartments with kitchens to clean, dishwashers to load and unload, beds to make, and trash to take out—what could go wrong?

San Francisco just announced it’s building micro-homes for some lucky addicts. 

They had to remove the Port-a-Potties from LA’s skid row a few years ago because they were being used as brothels. Prayers to the poor city employee who has to clean out each micro house when the resident ODs.

There's more at the link.

I think Ms. Keenan doesn't make allowance for the fact that some of the homeless are on the streets because of economic problems, and are not drug addicts.  I've met a number of them.  However, I'm in no doubt that the majority of the homeless are on the streets because of drug problems and mental health issues, most of the latter being related to the former.

Back in South Africa, in my younger days, I volunteered with a homeless persons' project, using an old church hall to provide overnight accommodation and a hot meal to the needy.  It was an eye-opening experience.  Most of the homeless with whom we dealt were more than willing to blame anybody and everybody but themselves for their plight.  They tried to bring in weapons, alcohol and drugs;  got violent if they thought they could intimidate volunteers;  and generally "played the system" for all they were worth.  For example, some "married couples" who came in for a night's shelter would turn out to be a prostitute and her pimp.  She'd turn tricks all night among the homeless men, who'd pay with whatever she would accept (usually drugs).  To deal with this, we were forced to segregate accommodation for men and women - only to be accused of "breaking up our marriage" by these serial fornicators, who had no scruples about using the Bible and our Christian faith as a weapon against us.  It took a very hard-nosed priest and ongoing instruction and support for the volunteers to prevent such tactics from succeeding.

When I came to this country, for the first couple of years I spent months traveling from city to city, raising funds for the church in Africa.  I took the opportunity to look at inner-city conditions, including homelessness, in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans and other big cities.  Not to my surprise, the homeless problem in this country proved to be just as much addiction-related (alcohol and/or drugs) as in South Africa.  That was in the '90's, but I understand nothing's changed except the scale of the problem and the ready availability of drugs these days.

The so-called "War On [Some] Drugs" has been a dismal failure.  Wikipedia notes:

In 2015, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the War on Drugs, estimated that the United States spends $51 billion annually on these initiatives, and in 2021, after 50 years of the drug war, others have estimated that the US has spent a cumulative $1 trillion on it.

One trillion dollars - yet drugs are more freely available, and cheaper, on American streets today than they've ever been.  If it's proved so spectacularly useless, I hear you ask, why are we still funding the War On Drugs?  For the answer, see the excerpt from Ms. Keenan's article above.  It's entrenched, systematized, politicized, legal bureaucratic graft.  Literally hundreds of thousands of Americans, from cops to drug counselors to homelessness bureaucrats to politicians to cronies of all of the above, are taking that money out of taxpayers' pockets and transferring it to their own.  We could abandon the War On Drugs tomorrow, deal with the dealers and their addicts through the regular criminal justice system (or just allow them to use more and more until it killed them), and save ourselves a fortune every year.  We wouldn't notice much difference on our streets, IMHO.

That would also help deal with our homelessness crisis.  By throwing more money at it every year, we're deliberately making it worse.  How do you get more of something you want?  By subsidizing it - and that's what we're doing to the homeless.  How do you get less of something you don't want?  By taxing it - which is precisely what we're not doing to the homeless.  If they were 'taxed' by having to endure the consequences of their chosen way of life, rather than assistance to live it;  if they had to fend for themselves instead of receiving fake bureaucratic sympathy and ever-increasing handouts;  then a great many of them would vanish from our streets overnight.  Yes, some of them - the hopelessly addicted - would die.  They're going to die anyway, no matter how many programs we launch for them.  There is no hope for them.  That's reality - a reality I've seen personally on African and American streets.  All that palliative programs are doing for them is postponing the inevitable, at our expense.  The funds thus wasted could pay for a great many programs to help those for whom there is still some hope of improvement.

By all means, create exceptions for those in genuine need, those on the streets through economic hardship;  but let them be thoroughly vetted, to make sure that's why they're there.  There's no room for touchy-feely moonbattery here.  It's got to be rooted in and founded on reality, and hard-nosed administrators have got to insist on that - otherwise it'll inevitably degenerate into the same sort of nonsense we have today.

I highly recommend reading the whole of Ms. Keenan's article.  It's revealing, frustrating, and very true.

Peter

Thoughts after being cut upon

 

Yesterday afternoon I went to our Palace of Pain (a.k.a. local clinic) for a minor procedure under local anesthetic.  I collected several bits and pieces of shrapnel, bullet fragments, etc. over the course of several years "up the sharp end" in Africa, and now and then they still work their way to the surface and try to come out.  A couple of them needed to be dealt with, so it was hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to the scalpel we go.

One of them revealed a few interesting things.  First off, the shrapnel had entered perpendicular to the skin and embedded itself fairly deeply, but not so deeply as to threaten internal organs.  It was a sharp sliver of metal, about 1/3" long, shaped like a dagger, a long narrow triangle.  It punched through a previous injury's scar tissue to get into my body, where it was encapsulated over time (the body's standard self-defense mechanism with foreign objects it can't expel).

(The nice lady doing the cutting wanted to know - rather indignantly - why the shrapnel hadn't been dealt with at the aid station, rather than left to fester in my body.  I had to explain that the first-line medical station practiced what M*A*S*H called "meatball surgery", where the worst injured got the most attention.  Relatively minor injuries like being peppered with bits of shrapnel got a cursory wipe-down with disinfectant from a corpsman, a quick examination from a harried doctor, and an aspirin or two.  "They'll deal with that at base when you get there."  With that, he turned to take care of the sucking chest wound and the leg that was so badly crushed as to be in danger of amputation if something wasn't done at once, if not sooner.  I could hardly argue with those priorities!  Back at base, the medic's response was, "Well, you haven't dropped dead over the past week on the way back here, so I guess you'll live.  Here, have another aspirin.")

Anyway, she made a half-inch incision over the lump in my back, pressed gently, and out popped a perfect little capsule, almost an inch long and filled with dead white blood cells and other "padding".  When she sliced it open, there was the shard of shrapnel, still sharp.  She was quite taken aback, having never seen something like that before.  She told me that my body had obviously been trying to expel this for a while, but that it had been positioned right below the scar tissue from my earlier injury, which was tougher than uninjured skin and resisted the pressure.  Since it couldn't get out, over time it kept pushing and formed a lump, which she'd just cut open.  The resulting hole in my body was only half an inch wide, but more than an inch deep.  She warned me it may not close fully, because it's had that encapsulated shard buried in it for so long, but we'll hope for the best.  If worse comes to worst, it'll need a more formal medical procedure to close it.

I felt rather strange looking at that fragment of metal.  I've been carrying the damned thing around in my flesh for over 36 years (and a few other bits and pieces as well).  In a sense, it had become part of me - but now it wasn't any more.  I recalled the firefight in which I'd "collected" it, and part of me wanted to find the guy who'd thrown the grenade and tell him that the war was over, there was no need to hate any more, and we could shake hands.  Sadly, he didn't survive the engagement, so that won't be possible - at least, not in this life.

I remembered, too, sitting on my couch in my apartment in Johannesburg, watching on TV the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9th November, 1989.  In Southern Africa, we'd been part of the "hotter" side of the Cold War.  The Soviet Union, communism and totalitarianism had been our enemies and bêtes noir for decades.  Watching as East and West Berliners climbed on top of the wall to embrace each other, and the dreaded East German border guards stood back and did nothing while peace broke out all over, was utterly mind-boggling to someone who'd been shooting at their ideological comrades for so long.  Slowly, a thought wormed its way into my mind:  Maybe, just maybe, I might live to see forty after all... (I'd turned thirty the previous year, and frankly had not expected to live that long.)

All that came back to my mind on seeing that little piece of shrapnel.  The Evil Empire had done its best to see that I didn't survive - but I had.  However, I was still carrying around the evidence of their attempts.  It felt really weird to look at it, almost sad in a way.  I don't know how to put it into words, except that it felt like a part of me had gone - and I don't mean the capsule surrounding the shrapnel.

Strange.  Very strange.  Have any of you who are combat vets ever had such a feeling?  Can you explain it better than I can?

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #1,086

 

Today's award goes to the Staten Island Ferry for their brand new $100 million white elephant, currently moored at Staten Island.

The dazzling new $100 million Staten Island Ferry boat named after a local war hero and christened by Mayor Bill de Blasio with much fanfare two weeks ago has been grounded — because the city hasn’t trained ferry workers how to operate it.

. . .

The Ollis boat — the first new vessel in the fleet in 16 years — was christened with much fanfare by the mayor, Staten Island elected officials and the soldier’s family on Oct. 4.

But the Post Wednesday morning found the SSG Michael H. Ollis — part of a $309 million fleet of three new boats — docked and dormant.

“I can’t imagine that the Ollis ferry will be put into service until next year. We have not seen a training plan,” Roland Rexha, secretary treasurer of the Marine Engineers and Beneficial Association, the union representing the captains and engineers who navigate the ferry.

. . .

As things currently stand, there’s not enough ferry staffers to do both the training and keep the current boats running at the same time, Rexha claimed.

There's more at the link.

Oh, well . . . what's a $100 million ferry between friends?  It's only taxpayers' and commuters' money, after all!

I wonder what the daily mooring charge is at Staten Island, and how much per day in lost revenue and upkeep costs the idle ship represents?  I have a feeling those figures might be impressive.

Peter

You know what's next, don't you?

 

If your blood doesn't run cold on reading this news, you don't understand the situation.

The White House on Wednesday unveiled its plans to vaccinate children between the ages of 5 and 11 years old, pending authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the coming weeks.

The Biden administration said it has purchased enough vaccines to give shots to all of the country’s 28 million children ages 5 to 11 years old, and have been working with state and local leaders to be ready to distribute the vaccines once they are authorized.

The distribution plan will rely on more than 25,000 pediatricians' office, community health centers, schools and pharmacies to put parents and children at ease, rather than the mass vaccination sites used in the initial rollout for adults.

There's more at the link.

Now put that together with the attitude displayed by a gubernatorial candidate in Virginia yesterday.

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe handed his Republican gubernatorial opponent Glenn Youngkin a campaign ad on a silver platter during a Tuesday debate by stating that he would not allow parents to tell schools what to teach their children.

McAuliffe, a Democrat who is seeking a second, nonconsecutive term as Virginia governor in November’s off-year election, proudly acknowledged Tuesday that he vetoed legislation while governor that would have alerted parents when there was sexually explicit content in instructional materials.

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Again, more at the link.

So much for parental rights, eh?  Add to that the dictatorial, "I-don't-answer-to-you" attitude just displayed by a Colorado school, where young children's COVID face masks were TAPED TO THEIR FACES by domineering, bullying teachers.  Parental consent?  Not requested, and not even considered, AFAIK.  It's a story that should make your blood boil with indignation, if not an altogether stronger emotion - but it's happening right now.  Do you know what the policies and practices of your local schools and School Board are?  If not, why not?

I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that as soon as FDA approval is given to vaccinate children against COVID-19, some schools in some parts of the country will begin inoculating children with or without their parents' consent.  They'll arrogate to themselves the right to decide what's best for the child.  They're already doing that in some states by providing free contraceptives, even abortifacients, to teenage children without telling their parents.  There's no reason in the world why they won't decide that a vaccination "for the chiiiiiilllldren!!!" doesn't fall under the same purview.  After all, they know they're right, and those who object are wrong.  They're ideologically pure in their own eyes.  We're not.

If you have children in public schools, particularly in "blue" states where the government feels it can dictate to its subjects what they may or may not do, you'd better start thinking twice, and then some, about getting them out.  The damage being done by COVID-19 vaccines is astonishing:  figures so high that any previous vaccine would long since have been withdrawn.  See for yourself (click the image for a larger view):

If you want that in your child's veins, just do nothing.  If, like me, you regard it as potentially more harmful than helpful . . . get your child out of public schools.  Now.

If you can't do that, make sure you notify the school, in writing (preferably a formal letter from a lawyer) that you forbid them to administer any vaccination to your child for any reason whatsoever, and threatening severe legal consequences if they disregard this warning.

I daresay some people will go so far as to threaten extra-legal consequences if schools do that.  I totally understand their anger and concern.

As far as our children are concerned, Big Brother is trending more and more towards Moloch.

Peter

Here it comes: the shortages start to hit home - and so does the backlash

 

I was saddened to read a post by Linda Fox over at Liberty's Torch yesterday evening.  It bears out what I've been saying in these pages for a long time, and brings home the fact that food shortages are no longer just a prospect - they're becoming a reality.  Do please note her last paragraph.

I happened to stop at a Walmart yesterday (needed a lot of diverse things – shower rod, hardware, and garden). I didn’t find as much in the store that I had on the list, so I decided to pick up a few things I’d been meaning to get at a grocery.

Guys, I haven’t been that shocked in a LONG time.

The staples were just about wiped out. The kind of things that sensible people have in their pantry or freezer? Flour, sugar, coffee? Seriously depleted, particularly the generic or cheaper items. You could find some gourmet or specialty brands, but you were going to pay for them.

Overall, the prices were at least 1/3 higher than they had been a few months ago. In some cases, IF the items were available, the prices had nearly doubled.

Now, I’ve been insulated from this, because my husband loves to shop ... But, in Walmart, I was seeing prices that the average household was paying for basic necessities. And, it was chilling.

Not only higher prices, but things that were not available.

. . .

This is a man-made, deliberate change. It has been caused by Leftists and their collaborators, and designed to break our will and ability to resist government authority.

There's more at the link.

I believe Linda is exactly right when she says this is "a man-made, deliberate change".  The mismanagement of our economy on so large a scale can't be accidental.  To take just one example:  progressive leftist environmentalists are trying to reduce (if not shut down) US oil and gas production.  That's led directly to the higher prices for gasoline, diesel, propane, natural gas, etc. that we're seeing every day.  As far as environmental purists are concerned, that's not a bug:  it's a feature.  They believe we'll be better stewards of Nature if we stop raping her by extracting oil and gas.  (The fact that we'll also be colder, hungrier and poorer is our problem, not theirs.  They'll make sure that our taxpayer dollars will make up any shortfall they experience.)

The next step is to blame "hoarders" for the shortages.  Again, this is an old, old tactic.  It's been around for centuries:  make the masses blame anyone except those who are actually responsible.  Bloomberg reports, under the headline " ‘People Are Hoarding’: Food Shortages Are The Next Supply-Chain Crunch" (bold, underlined text is my emphasis):

“Early in the pandemic, panic buying was the cause of many of the out-of-stock situations that grocers experienced,” general manager I’Talia McCarthy said in an email to store owners this month. “Although the food industry was able to somewhat rebound, the sustained nature of the pandemic, combined with the slow pace of vaccination globally and the recent surge caused by the delta variant, have resurfaced the problem.”

. . .

“People are hoarding,” said CEO and founder Adnan Durrani. “What I think you’ll see over the next six months, all prices will go higher.”

Again, more at the link.

Weasel words.  It's not "panic buying":  it's prudent buying.  When you can see the writing on the wall, when shortages are all around you and getting worse, it makes good sense to buy more of what you use most, to make sure you'll have some if it ceases to be freely available.  That applies particularly to people with dietary issues, who can't eat all commonly available foods.  They'd be between a rock and a hard place if they couldn't get the foods they need to survive without making themselves sick.

Similarly, we're not talking about compulsive hoarding.  Preppers are taking reasonable precautions to stock up against a forthcoming, predictable shortage.  All sorts of critters in nature do the same thing:  squirrels storing up nuts for winter;  bears eating themselves fat (to the point of obesity) on salmon because they know they won't be eating during hibernation in winter;  and so on.  Our ancestors and forefathers lived that lifestyle from birth until death.  If they didn't have a good harvest in summer, they starved the following winter.  Wars were fought to steal other peoples' food stocks.  (They still happen in Third World countries, even if it's not widely reported.  In parts of Africa, raids by one village on another to steal their stored grain are not unusual.  I've personally experienced them.)

There's another thing.  Tens of millions of Americans rely on food stamps (or their modern equivalent, electronic benefits transfers, or EBT) to buy food every month.  The cost of that food is increasing very quickly, but the amount they receive every month is not.  What happens when EBT no longer covers their nutrition needs?  What happens if the authorities (as they should, IMHO) prevent EBT funds from being used for fripperies and non-nutritious purchases like sodas, luxury foods like lobster or steak, and so on?  That would stretch EBT funds a lot further, but those who've grown used to living high on the hog on their EBT will almost certainly riot if such restrictions are imposed.  What's more, state authorities don't have enough money in their budgets to increase EBT benefits, so recipients will still face a food deficit.  Add that to known, predictable food shortages, and you've got a recipe for serious urban unrest.

I see nothing wrong in applying Miss D.'s and my limited resources to ensuring that we have enough food to last us a few months if the supply chain becomes seriously disrupted, for whatever reason.  Even as we buy food for our "deep pantry", we continue to support a local food bank.  We don't tithe to a church, but we tithe to friends and those we know to be good people who are in need of support, whether in cash or in kind.  I don't think we're being selfish at all.  We're trying to be wise virgins rather than foolish virgins, in the food sense - although virginity is, alas, no longer a factor!

If you haven't yet begun to build up your "deep pantry", so that you can cope for at least 30 days without going shopping if you have to, you're behind the curve.  I can only suggest you "get with the program" as quickly as possible.  The way things are going, this will be a pass/fail exam in the school of life . . . and you don't want to fail.

Peter

State of the author as Christmas draws near

 

I'm grateful to you, dear readers, for the encouragement many have provided over the past couple of years as I dealt with the fallout from a heart attack and two bouts with COVID-19.  They disrupted my writing very severely, but I've been on the mend and working hard.  As a result, no less than seven books are in the pipeline for the next year or so.  I've also, in recent months, been active in helping Miss D. edit, format and publish her latest two novels, "Blood, Oil and Love" and "A Perfect Day, With Explosions".  Both have been well received.

You may wonder how on earth I could write so many books, so quickly.  The answer is simple - they haven't been written quickly, but in spurts.  I found the additional medication I was taking really messed with my writing creativity, so that I couldn't focus on a project for long before I had to take a break and get my mind on other things.  As a result, I started books in a number of different genres - a Western, a Viking fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, and so on.  Depending on my mood and ability on any given day, I'd pick up one of them and write a few pages, then set it aside.  If my interest on a different day was piqued by something else, I'd pick another book and do the same.  I've thus ended up with several books that are more than half completed, and others that are coming along.  Now that I'm off the additional medications and able to focus properly on my writing once more, I'm working on completing them and publishing them.

I'll need your help in making a success of these books.  If a writer is out of the public eye for too long, he loses his "visibility" in the market.  Thanks to illness and related factors, that's where I am right now.  I'm going to have to re-establish market visibility - another reason for publishing several books in quick succession, because readers who liked one may be motivated to buy more and give them a try.  At any rate, that's what I hope will happen.  I'll ask your help in leaving honest reviews of my books, and mentioning them on your social media pages, etc. as they come out, so as to enhance their visibility.  If people don't know they're there, they won't buy them!  (Of course, if you don't like my writing, don't bother to mention them - that goes without saying.)

At any rate, the next (fifth) volume in my Ames Archives Western series, titled "Silver In The Stones", is well on the way to completion.  The cover is in preparation, based on this Frederic Remington drawing of a prospector at work.  (The original's in black-and-white;  this rendition is colorized.)

There are only a few thousand more words to be written.  I hope to publish it during the second half of November.

Also coming, although not necessarily in this order, are:

• The sixth volume in the Maxwell Saga, titled "Venom Strike".
• The third and final volume in the Laredo War Trilogy, titled "Knife To The Hilt".
• The first in a proposed trilogy of Civil War historical fiction naval novels, title as yet undecided.  This will be as accurate as I can make it from an historical perspective, because I'm tired of naval blood-and-thunder books that don't match up to the facts of the era.
• A novel (perhaps the first in a short series, perhaps stand-alone - I haven't decided yet) on space warfare in a "hard science" world (i.e. no faster-than-light travel, no handwavium about super-technologies, etc.).
• A "best of" compilation of posts from this blog, about which I asked you a few weeks ago.  There seems to be a fair amount of interest in it.
• A very practical, down-to-earth look at emergency preparations.  There's far too much emphasis in much of the available literature about "Buy this, and you'll be prepared!"  There's a lot more to it than spending money, and a lot can be done without spending much at all.  I'll try to focus on the latter, for the benefit of those of us (like yours truly) on a limited budget.

That's what's currently on the list, plus a couple of short stories for forthcoming compilations.  Seven books, no less, all currently in preparation.  If I appear short of breath sometimes, that's why!

Anyway, I'm off to write some more of the latest Ames chronicle.  I hope you'll like it when it's published next month (God willing).

Peter

Empty containers are now a big part of the supply chain logjam

 

For a long time, commenters (including yours truly) have noted that part of our supply chain problems is that empty containers can't get to factories on schedule, in order to be filled with goods for shipment to markets.  That's still a problem:  but it's being aggravated by much more serious problems with empty containers.  It's a complicated issue.

First, containers that arrive at their destinations have to wait to be emptied, because warehouse space is limited and distribution channels are already overloaded.  A box that travels from China may take two to three months to get here (from wherever it was stored to the factory, then factory to harbor, harbor to ship, ship across the Pacific to America, from ship to shore, from shore to inland transport - rail or road - and then to the distributor, where it'll be unloaded and its contents delivered).  However, the supply pipeline that delivered it is still clogged with more containers being delivered.  How is the now-empty container to be returned for another load?

That's a lot more complicated than it sounds.  Logically, one would expect that the next rail car or truck to offload its incoming containers would simply be reloaded with empty containers and sent back to a seaport.  However, there's such a backlog that those rail cars and trucks may have to sit, loaded, waiting for days, weeks or even months before they can be offloaded.  While they're sitting there, they can't carry more containers.  They've effectively been removed from the pool of available vehicles.  The untold thousands of empty containers awaiting return therefore can't be picked up - they have to sit and wait.  That creates immense storage problems for receiving depots and warehouses, which have dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of empty containers filling all available space, preventing them from taking delivery of more incoming containers.

What's more, when a rail car or truck eventually becomes available, it may be nowhere near where the empty containers are waiting.  It might have to be sent back to the port very urgently, to collect the next shipment of incoming containers, even though that may mean leaving empty containers behind.  Time (in the form of storage fees for full containers, costs to distributors and retailers through delays in getting their products to market, etc.) may be more expensive than the price of a container these days.  If the vehicle is forced to wait to collect empties, some shippers are now adding surcharges to their rates to pay for the delay costs, plus the missed opportunity to load up with better-paying full containers.  In so many words, the longer a container remains at a distributor, the more it costs them in storage space, and the more it costs them to get rid of it.  They can't win.

That also affects US factories and producers waiting for containers to load products for export.  The overloaded road and rail networks can't cope with their present burden.  When you add to that the need to ship an empty container from receiving warehouse A to manufacturer B, to be loaded there and then shipped to port C, you're adding in an extra leg of the journey - and there may not be enough vehicles available to cope with that.  They're all overloaded just dealing with the present situation, without any extra legs.  Hence, US manufacturers are complaining they're being short-changed because they can't get the empty containers they need.

When the empty containers finally get back to a port, the harbor is faced with the dilemma of where to put them if there's no ship on which to load them.  Some British ports recently hit this problem head-on.

London Gateway has shut its gates to some empty container flows after receiving a deluge of boxes diverted from Felixstowe, which had similar problems earlier in the week.

. . .

“CMA now been shut out from Felixstowe, hauliers are having real problems knowing where there is space to return empties – I have one of my hauliers charging me £500 [about US $700] on top of my rate, so a lot of hauliers are trying to profiteer.

“I am hearing the ports are telling shipping lines, ‘you’re not berthing unless you commit to loading your empties back out’,” one freight forwarder told The Loadstar this week.

. . .

However, Maersk explained that the gate closure earlier in the week at Felixstowe had now caused congestion problems at London Gateway.

“Due to the high volume of empty returns following the gate closures at Felixstowe, we have seen an extraordinary amount of empty returns into London Gateway. Already operating with a high yard density, yesterday the terminal authorities made the difficult decision to close their gates for empty returns,” it said, adding that it did not expect the gates to reopen until next week, although it had secured some additional storage space in nearby Tilbury.

A London Gateway customer advisory issued last night said: “With the current high volumes (laden and empties), we are closely monitoring our stack levels to ensure port operations are not compromised.”

There's more at the link.

Even when the empty containers reach a port and are loaded onto ships to send back to their ports of origin, that's not the end of the problem.  Some of those ports are so full of other containers that they have no place to offload and store the empties.  This costs shipping companies a huge amount while the empties take up space on board ship - space that can't be used to carry a full container to its destination.  Maersk estimates its ships are sailing around with up to 4 million empty containers every year, and the problem is costing it about a billion dollars annually.  That's just one company.  Imagine how much it's costing the shipping industry as a whole.

Of course, the shippers are going to try to recover those "empty costs" from the customers who ship with them - who are going to be very, very unhappy at having to shoulder the additional expense!  Some customers may decide it's better to abandon empty containers in the USA, rather than pay through the nose to have them shipped back to China.  That would apply particularly to containers that are a few years old and have already made multiple journeys, and have therefore amortized their purchase price in full.  Their owners can afford to "write them off" the books as a loss against their taxes.  An accountant might find that appealing.

There are lots of companies marketing empty containers to Americans.  They're used as storage buildings, converted to residences, and all sorts of other things.  You'd think that, with so many empties available, their price on the used market would drop;  but many such companies appear to be trying to use the supply chain logjam as an excuse to raise their prices, on the grounds that all containers are in use and it's hard for them to get any more.  That's not true, of course.  There are so many empties right now that they should be selling for pennies on the dollar;  but then nobody in the business would make any money on them.  The transport costs to move them from where they are to where they're needed are far more expensive (and hard to arrange right now) than the cost of the containers themselves.

To keep pace with this problem, and make sure containers are still available, shipping companies are ordering more of them (to the tune of literally billions of dollars) from manufacturers in China, who are working flat out to build them.  For example, Evergreen has ordered 16,000 new containers this year alone, and will probably order more before long.  It's sometimes cheaper, faster and more convenient to buy a brand-new container from a Chinese factory, and have them ship it directly to another manufacturer who'll fill it with their products, than it is to arrange the long, tortuous, expensive return of an empty container from the US Midwest to China.

I wonder how long it'll be before empty containers build up across the American landscape like flotsam and jetsam on a beach?  I'm already seeing "container parks" being set up on empty ground near a couple of major cities near here, where empties are stacked high and spreading out.  Who'll pay to clean up those sites in due course, and scrap the containers?

Peter

"The Shadow Superpower" - the $10 trillion global black market

 

Foreign Policy magazine calls the global black market "the world's fastest growing economy -- and its future".

What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system ... It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ... concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working ... off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of [this system]. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s throughout the United States. And it’s not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi’s deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, [it] is multinational, moving all sorts of products — machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more — around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.

In many countries — particularly in the developing world — [the black market] is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. But even in developed countries, after the financial crisis of 2008-09, [it] was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated — in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust [black market] — fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.

. . .

... it’s possible to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the approximate value of the billions of underground transactions around the world. And it comes to this: The total value of [the black market] as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If [it] were an independent nation, united in a single political structure — call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan — it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn’t snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century.

In other words, [the black market] looks a lot like the future of the global economy.

There's more at the link.

Of course, an important aspect of the black market is that earnings are in cash or in kind, and transactions are not taxed or registered in the "official" economy.  That's one reason why governments all over the world are constantly trying to crack down on it, so that they can collect the taxes they insist they're owed.  Independent-minded entrepreneurs, on the other hand, see no reason why they should hand over a portion (often an exorbitant portion) of their hard-earned dollars to bureaucrats and politicians.  It's hard not to sympathize with them.

I daresay the black market will become a mainstay of the resistance offered to "nanny state" governments like the Biden administration as they seek to extend their tentacles into every walk of life.  I, for one, have every intention of seizing every opportunity for independent thought, work and life that I can get my hands on.

Are you with me?  If so, let our rallying cry be, "To hell with Big Brother"!

Peter

Beware of "woke" charities, and don't support them

 

Fellow blogger Eaton Rapids Joe mentioned a decision reached by his family.

It is with a heavy-heart that the ERJ family will stop donating to the Catholic Relief Services. Over the last fifteen years we contributed half of our "discretionary" tithe to them...perhaps $600 a year.

A nagging question had popped into my head "Who is funding the 'refugees/migrants' as they traveled from their home-countries to our southern border?"

It took just a few minutes to determine that the Catholic Relief Services has been complicit in flooding our cities and towns with economic refugees who have minimal intentions of assimilating.

. . .

If you follow-the-money, it becomes apparent that the CRS mutated into an organization that whitewashes  the actions of the Deep State. It is about as "Catholic" as a coin-laundromat.

There's more at the link.

Joe is quite right.  CRS has been a left-leaning organization for decades, and during the 21st century (so far) has become just another politically correct, progressive-left shill.  The causes it supports are seldom those of the truly needy, but are increasingly those sucking in funds from everywhere they can to build support for a "woke" society.

The same, unfortunately, has happened to a great many organizations.  The Red Cross is now as "converged" as they come, so much so that I've diverted all my contributions to relief efforts to the Salvation Army, which has never lost sight of its founding purpose.  It's happened to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides as well (to whom I will no longer contribute in any way - I'm much more likely to fund any organization dedicating itself to destroying both of them!).  It's happened to many allegedly "conservative" political organizations, who turn out to be shills for the Uniparty rather than conservatism, and want to line their pockets with our hard-earned money for their own benefit rather than America's.  It's happened to many formerly worthy causes that have been subverted and co-opted to serve a very different cause and purpose to what their founders intended.

Take a long, hard, very careful look at organizations that appeal for your support, whether they be political, social, economic or cultural in orientation.  Upon deeper examination, most aren't worth anything to those of us with more "traditional" standards and values.  We can find better, more appropriate ways to spend our charity dollars.

Peter