Back to CA

Will be flying back to California tomorrow to finalize the sale of my house there, AND--most important of all--to pick up the dogs. I will spend a few days there, maybe three or four, then gas up the Silverado, and the beasts and I are off on our great road trip in search of dog friendly motels across the mighty US of A.

I will try as much as possible to keep to a southerly route to try to avoid possible snow in this era of "warming."

Will have the laptop along and will try to put up a couple of posts--I hope they're not as boring as the slideshows of yesteryear by your local neighborhood bore, "And here I am in the Zambezi River . . . "

Anyhow, off we go . . .

Black Friday

Day after Thanksgiving.

Had most of the kids and their significant others at the new house in North Carolina. They brought along three rowdy dogs, so it was all good.

Unlike past Thanksgivings, we did not have a paella, nor did we share our day with the Native Americans at the local Indian casino. I figured, we are in North Carolina, and we would eat accordingly. I, therefore, ordered a massive "tailgate" meal from a local BBQ shack: pulled pork, ribs, sausage, hush puppies, fried okra, potato salad, and other good stuff. My wife ordered a vegetarian meal (gag!) from a local pretentious shop which seems to cater mostly to relocated Yankees--the meal, in truth, wasn't bad. In fact, we haven't had a bad meal since coming to NC. Things went well, lots of politics and culture discussed, and nobody was beaten or killed; the dogs ran wild all over the new house and property, and even managed to encounter a small herd of six or seven deer making its leisurely way through our woods. All of us were quite thankful that Hillary is not president.

The news? What can I say? The Religion of Peace showed its true colors yet again massacring hundreds of fellow Muslims at a prayer service in the Sinai.

At home, the progressive implosion continues as the lefties denounce each other for sexual improprieties. The election of Trump has revealed their madness. As noted above, all good, all good.

Off to be a tour guide.

Feathers: My Usual Thanksgiving Repost on a Repast from the Past

Feathers 

Yes, feathers. Not the figurative kind that fill leftoid heads, but the real kind that cover birds. We are going light today. Our topic is feathers and how they nearly produced a civil war in the Diplomad clan, and how echoes of that strife apparently will reverberate on the 4th of July.

As the six regular readers of this blog are painfully aware, during the Reagan years I served for a time at the UN in New York. We loved New York City, even with all its inconveniences especially with two rambunctious boys. Schooling was a problem as the local PS was, well, pretty bad. When two of the vastly overpaid teachers at the school told us that they would never send their own kids there, we decided to yank our boys out and send them--at considerable cost to the Diplomad bottom line--to private schools. One went to a school run by Irish Catholic nuns, who wanted no parental involvement, "Thank you very much, but we know how to do this." The older son went to one run by strangely liberal, yet oddly conservative Jews who wanted lots of parental involvement in the school as long as the parents did what the school wanted. Hey, it's New York. Live with it.

Well, as it does every year, the Thanksgiving holiday rolled around. You must understand we had spent most of our lives overseas. The boys had been born in Spain, and hardly had been in the US. Educated abroad, they--God help me--had grown to love soccer football soccer with both of them becoming (and remaining to this day) rabid fans of Spain's La Furia Roja. Their grip on Americana was a bit weak. Please remember that as this saga proceeds.

Another piece of background you will need. My Spanish wife hates, detests, abhors, loathes, etc, feathers and any creature sporting them. She shows a special wrath for chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. She cannot stand the thought of fowl on the meal plate. I have seen her blanche and break out into a cold sweat at fancy diplo dinners when served quail, duck or some other feather-bearing beast. It is not funny; better said, she has no sense of humor about this matter. My efforts to convince her that chicken tastes just like iguana have had no positive effect. Whenever we go to a restaurant, regardless of what she orders, she insists on, ahem, grilling the waiter on whether any foul fowl was involved in the making of her pending meal, "Uh, no ma'am, our salmon is, uh, salmon. It's a fish, not a bird." "Yes, yes, but the rice and the vegetables, were they cooked with chicken?" I am used to it by now.

Thanksgiving Day in New York, 1985. My older son, then about six was in a bad mood. I asked what was wrong, "You have no school today. Mom is making a nice Thanksgiving meal. What's wrong?" He glared at me, "The Pilgrims did not eat paella! They ate turkey!"

Explanation. Given the Diplowife's aversion to feathery creatures, our overseas Thanksgiving Day meals consisted of seafood paella. My wife had, ahem, implied in some way . . . oh, heck, she flat out told the kids that the Pilgrims ate paella with the Indians. Maybe she was thinking about Cortez and Pizarro, I don't know, but anyhow the kids had gotten into their heads that paella was the meal on Thanksgiving. Now in NY, the older boy had been asked the previous day to make a presentation at school on Thanksgiving. He, of course, reported that the English Pilgrims sat down and shared paella with the Native Americans. This caused a bit of a commotion and, I guess, led to some considerable ridicule, or what the politically correct nanny-staters now would label "bullying."

He was furious with us. He refused to eat paella and demanded a turkey. Even my wife was shocked into submission by the uncompromising fury coming from the tyke. It was Thanksgiving Day. I had to find a turkey in Manhattan! I dashed out of our building on the upper east side. All of the supermarkets were closed. A turkey! My kingdom for a turkey! I wandered the cold, darkling desolate concrete canyons, my despair growing and threatening to overwhelm me. I had let down my kids! The wages of sin, the consequences of falsehoods! God give me a sign that You will allow me to redeem myself . . . Wait! A deli! Still open but about to close! I ran in! Turkey sandwiches! They must have a turkey somewhere! A bizarre negotiation followed in which I finally convinced the suspicious Pakistani owner of the "Jewish" deli to sell me a whole kosher turkey at the price per pound of the sliced sandwich meat. I paid him a fortune--in cash--for a small bird about the size of a Chihuahua, and ran like the Grinch with my turkey under my arm.

My kids had turkey that day, and every other Thanksgiving since then has featured a big bird on the table. My wife refuses to sit anywhere near it, and has her own separate fish-based meal.

This will be an issue on the Fourth of July. The Thanksgiving paella got moved to Independence Day. The kids, now grown, of course, alas, are starting to make noises of impending rebellion against paella and in favor of hot dogs and other beast meat. The Diplowife mistrusts hotdogs, even the kosher all-beef ones, as stealth chicken missiles. She does not want anything with the potential of bearing fowl touching our BBQ grill or being anywhere near anything else that might be cooking. It appears that we might have a split Fourth meal. One side of the family eating chicken wings and hotdogs, and the other with the paella. Now that I think about it, this seems an appropriate metaphor for what is happening to our country.

Moore's the Pity?

Just a quick note as I am still unpacking, and a variety of techs and movers and delivery people are crawling all over the house. The Diplowife happier than a pig in mud, with her directing, supervising, giving orders . . . I get tired watching her.

Have been following only from a distance the Roy Moore senatorial election saga.

I don't know Moore; know very little about him; have no idea if he would be a good or bad senator from the Great State of Alabama. I, however, find disgusting this progressive/DNC tactic of launching swarm attacks alleging sexual improprieties of some 30-40 years ago. Frankly, when you have time to examine any particular one of the allegations, it almost invariably comes up short in the credibility department. There always seems to be some fatal flaw in the account that discredits it.

The progs, however, don't care. It's akin to the old Soviet WWII tactic of dealing with minefields: you just keep running through them. Individual soldiers get killed but the overall attack continues. You see, for example, how the press reports on the allegations, e.g., "dozens of women have come forth." The fact that individual stories seem to get blown up by the minefield of truth, does not stop the wave. The onslaught continues.

This weaponization of everything is going to tear us apart as a nation.

I hope Moore wins.

Gone South

Sorry for the long break in blogging. We have made the move, internet is on, and I am loving North Carolina. Hope to start blogging ASAP, once all these pesky boxes disappear.

I have to say that throughout my long career in the Foreign Service and the many, many moves,  I proved either the luckiest or unluckiest FSO. My stuff always arrived. Through pirate infested seas, bandit clogged ports and highways, hurricanes, etc., my stuff always showed up. I couldn't get rid of it! That streak continues. . . . sigh.

Clintons, Again

Surpassed in the past perhaps only by the Kennedy clan, the Clintons just can't seem to stop generating attention. The very latest piece of publicity comes from former Clinton toadie Donna Brazile--the very one who helped slip the questions to Clinton before her debate with Sanders. This former DNC acting Chairman, and lifelong political hack of the rankest kind (remember her attacks on Barbara Bush?) has suddenly got religion and has lobbed the "bombshell" revelation that Hillary Clinton (shocked face!) is a duplicitous, conniving, crooked politico with no ethical standards. Wow! Who'd a thunk that? And, and (breathless!) she used her vast monetary reserves to take over the essentially bankrupt DNC (Thanks Obama!) and tried to rig the primaries against the dopey Bernie Sanders. Wow! Why has nobody ever said this before? What else Donna, what else? Tells us what else you have discovered? Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? Harvey Weinstein is a sexual predator?

The only interesting thing about the Brazile "revelations" is that even some of the closet collaborators of the Clinton Crime Family seem to be placing some distance between them and the CCF. Maybe we are seeing the end of the CCF? Dare we hope? We even see the hopeless Elizabeth Warren acknowledge, after months of denying it, that the Democratic primaries were rigged against Sanders. We see some of her closest confidants acknowledge, ah, gosh, yes, the Hillary camp paid for the phony Russia/Steele dossier on Trump which has led to the absurd collusion investigation now consuming millions of dollars. This, of course, after a year of Hillary's denying any involvement in the dossier. Hillary, herself, now no longer denies it, trying to justify as standard "oppo research" the payment of millions to foreigners, including former and active Russian government officials, to gin up the salacious dossier.

I will write more about this later, but for now let's just note that perhaps the greatest feature of the long history of Clinton corruption is how open it is; unlike what one would think a crook would do, secrecy is not at the core of their operations. The Clintons involve dozens, perhaps hundreds of people in their corrupt schemes, and make those schemes so massive and so wide-spread that it is hard to understand, analyze, and bring down. We are left like a blind man trying to describe a sunset. Whitewater. Travelgate. Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton Foundation. Lavishly reimbursed speaking tours. Uranium One. Pay for Play. Buying a political party. Private email server. And on, and on. It is rather breathtaking.

Al Capone could have learned a lot from the Clintons.

Meanwhile, Donna Brazile continues on her atonement circuit. Like the Weinstein denouncers, just a bit too late.