Thursday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“Worthless people live to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink to live.”

Socrates

Tuesday night one hell of a storm front came through the Gulf Coast in Northwest Florida. As incredible as it seems it was reported that there was 15” to 20” of rain that fell in 24 hours in the Pensacola area. As some of you know I go to Pensacola Beach twice a year and I have a daughter that lives near there. She lives about 6 miles east of downtown Pensacola near the town of Gulf Breeze. I called her Wednesday morning and she said her back yard was a lake but water had not yet entered the house and she did not expect it to but others on her street did have flooding and overflowing septic tanks. I am glad that she is OK but there will be a hell of a problem with flooded roads for a while. There was one fatality. A woman was caught driving down a road that flash flooded, it rolled her over and she drowned in the car.

This past Tuesday evening Clayton Lockett was scheduled for execution in Oklahoma. The method of execution was lethal injection. It seems that Oklahoma was using an untested drug and when it was administered to Clayton things did not go as planned. He was given the death penalty for shooting a teen-aged girl with a sawed off shotgun which did not kill her then he oversaw the burial of this girl while still alive. When the poison was administered to Clayton he gasped, struggled and convulsed until the execution was suspended. He died 45 minutes later of a heart attack. This, my friends, is karma.

It was reported this past Tuesday afternoon that the president of the NBA Adam Silver banned Donald Sterling for life and fined him $2.5 million.

I guess all of y'all saw that the ever present Al Sharpton had a few nasty things to say about Sterling. It is true that Americans can say pretty much anything they want but this imbecile only pipes up when there are things to say that are racially charged. Even black news reporters said that Sharpton is a “sad person”.

All of this brought to mind one of the worst displays of racial prejudice in history that few people ever heard of. In the middle of the 14^th century the bubonic plague was brought to Europe by the returning Crusaders. People were dropping like flies of this horrible disease. Nobody figured out that it was the fleas on the rats that hitchhiked in from the Middle East and Turkey. What some did assume was that God was displeased with world's sins and sent this plague as punishment. They gathered in large groups at churches to pray for God to lighten up. Large gathering like this just promoted the distribution of the Bubonic plague virus. Then there were the “flagellants”. These guys (mostly Catholic monks) believed that if they inflicted pain upon themselves it would appease God. They wandered through the countryside and used tree branches and “cat-o-nine-tails” whips to beat their backs into spaghetti. The prayers and the beatings did not help so the people decided that this plague was sent among them by the Jews and there was many murders of the Jews because of this bigotry. The bad part was these Jews were either beaten to death, stoned to death or subjected to a large variety of tortures. This did not work either...but the Jews were just as dead. Like I said, racism has no parameters.

Then back in the early 16^th century the Catholic church in Spain decided that they wanted all of the available donations and persuaded the King to evict the Jews but would allow them to stay if they became Catholic (donations, remember?). Sure enough the Jews left or pretended to be Catholic. Those that left took a hell of a lot of money with them which would have been catastrophic under normal circumstances but the Spanish were in the middle of raping the Maya and Inca in Mexico and Central America bringing literally tons of gold and silver back to Spain.

Finally, In the early 1800's the Mexican government opened up part of their lands to settlers. Most of this this huge amount of land is what is now Texas. The minimum land grant was a “league” and/or a “labor”. A league was about 600 acres with no water front (rivers) and labor did have water access as part of the grant. The only thing was that the settler had to sign a document stating that they were or would be Catholic. I ain't anti-Catholic...I am just relaying what is written in the history books.

This Date in History May 1

1863 On this date began the first day of the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia. It was in this battle that the superior battle savvy of CSA Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson became known to the world. The Union army in that area known as the Army of the Potomac and had been through several commanders and all had their asses handed to them by CSA General R.E. Lee. The newest one was US General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Hooker relieved US General Ambrose Burnside after the disastrous Fredericksburg winter campaign where Burnside lost 14,000 to Lee’s 5,000. Now was the best chance the Union army ever had. The Army of the Potomac numbered 133,000 and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia numbered 60,000. The Confederate corps under the command of CSA General James Longstreet was on detached duty to the south. Hooker’s plan was a good one. He was going to pin down the Confederates that were dug in on the flat plain of the Rappahannock River and then head upstream with a substantial number of troops, cross the river and attack Lee from the rear. Lee surmised that Hooker had this in mind and detached most of his troops and headed upstream to meet Hooker’s flanking attack leaving CSA General Jubal Early and his corps dug in on the flat plain. Lee and Hooker met just north of the Wilderness and a battle ensued. Hooker was baffled to think that Lee had correctly guessed his strategy, and even though he had Lee outnumbered more than two to one, he chose to dig in and set up a defensive perimeter. Lee jumped at this chance to take the initiative and take it he did. Lee split his army yet again and sent Stonewall Jackson and 25,000 troops around the right flank of the Union defenses and about 5:00p, rabbits, deer and other wildlife boiled out of the wood behind the Union lines followed closely by Stonewall Jackson’s cavalry and howling infantry. The Union infantry were gathered around their campfires making dinner and we caught completely by surprise and tumbled eastward in a headlong retreat. This action fragmented the Union infantry and the Confederates were able to isolate and crush them piecemeal. After a couple of days of this ass-whipping they and General Hooker were heading their young asses back to Washington in a total rout. It was in this battle and the Shenandoah Valley campaign that made “Stonewall” Jackson is a legend in the annuls of military history. Military historians call Lee’s action in this encounter as “the perfect battle”. This evening Stonewall Jackson was out scouting to find out where the Union positions ended up. He was shot by a Confederate soldier by accident. The wound cost him his left arm but it did not appear to be life threatening. They were wrong. Jackson developed pneumonia and died 10 days later. It was a terrible blow to the Confederate army.

1960 On this date in this year I was in the United States Air Force stationed at Eielson AFB, Alaska. Eielson was an intelligence gathering and cold weather testing base, meaning there was a lot of spy planes that passed through there like RB-47’s, RB-66’s, RB-58’s, and an occasional U-2. I found out later that the U-2’s were capable of flying at or above 70,000 feet and the CIA believed that the Russians had no fighters or missiles that could reach that altitude so they would send U-2’s on over flights of Russia taking precision photos along the way. On one particular night, the klaxon began blasting and SAC intelligence officers ran up in the control tower with me and we spent the night together. The story was that the Russians had something interesting going on near the Bering Straits and our military wanted photos. This particular night they chose to send out an RB-47 and a KC-135 tanker. Neither plane got off the ground because the fuel was contaminated. To this day I think it was sabotage and so did the SAC officers. Speaking of U-2’s, later on one of them departed Karachi, Pakistan and was on his way to Buda, Norway, but it might have been vice-versa but in any event Russia is in the middle of that flight path. This spy flight U-2 was shot down in Russia with CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers aboard. The CIA was not worried, the said that there was no part of the plane that was identifiable as American and the pilot was suppose to commit suicide with a cyanide tablet that was aboard the aircraft, therefore President Eisenhower said it was a weather recon aircraft that had gotten off course. Little did President Ike know that the pilot had not taken the poison but was alive and in the hands of the Russians, parachute and a large chunk of the aircraft included. Well, after this Ike had to admit it was indeed a spy flight and the relationship with the Russians hit an all time low. Powers was a prisoner for two years then he was swapped for master Russian spy Rudolph Abel. It seems that Abel had been spying for Russia on United States while on the ground and not aloft. Spying is spying.

1852 On this date Martha Jane Canary is born in Princeton, Missouri. Martha Jane became a legend in the old west by claiming to be the lover of Colonel George A. Custer and had indeed bore him a child. The history of the west and Custer in particular showed that this was a bullshit story. But she was indeed part of an expedition into the so-called sacred hills of South Dakota, better known as the Black Hills which the Cheyenne held sacred. It was there that she gained the nickname of Calamity Jane. She was probably just a laundress, but she was there. Eventually she ended up in one of the most famous towns of the old west, Deadwood South Dakota. It was there that she claimed that she was the lover of Wild Bill Hickock who was indeed a temporary resident of Deadwood but there is no evidence that she and Wild Bill ever got together. Eventually she told her tales so many times that she began to believe them herself. Jane eventually let the booze soak into her brain and she was found hiring her self out in a black brothel in a town called Horr, Montana. She was offered help but she said that she wanted to be left alone and “wanted to go to hell by her own path.” A few months later she was found dead in Terry, Wyoming. She was 51 years old.

1898 A few months before the US battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor for reasons unknown. A naval investigation showed it was caused by a mine no matter whose it was but that was probably not the real reason. In any case, a series of events led to the United States and Spain declaring war on each other. At the same time US Commodore George Dewey was tasked by US President William McKinley with the destruction of the Spanish fleet in the Pacific. Dewey found the Spanish fleet anchored in Manila Bay in the Philippines. Dewey had all the ships in his fleet to extinguish their lights and on this night they sneaked into the harbor and deployed. At the crack of dawn Commodore Dewey issued the famous order to the commander of his flagship the USS Olympia saying “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” And Gridley indeed opened fire and 10 of the Spanish vessels were sunk in their moorings from which the Spanish navy never recovered. The Spanish-American War was over in short order after this fiasco.

Born today:

1918 TV host Jack Paar. He said “Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.” Si senor.

1922 US writer Joseph Heller. He said “Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include phlegm and tooth decay as his divine system of creation?” Joe Heller wrote the famous book “Catch 22”.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow