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Floggings Indicated

Crime, Illegal immigrants

Then you have this kind of Lefty fun and games:

Four anti-ICE activists were arrested after allegedly planting homemade tire deflation devices around vehicles belonging to federal law enforcement agents conducting immigration enforcement operations in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The question, then, is what kind of punishment should be meted out to the little scamps who perpetrated this mischief?

Obviously, this is overkill (so to speak):

…because the tire-spikes are not deadly things, per se.

And clearly, fines and similar wrist-slaps are not adequate punishment either;  but imprisonment seems a little harsh — not to me, but to the average citizen, maybe.  So perhaps a little public punishment might be called for:

Lots of owie, but nothing long-lasting — pour encourager les autres, if you’ll excuse my French.

Just sayin’.

Bare Ruin’d Choirs

Deep Thoughts

When King Henry VIII ordered the destruction of Catholic monasteries and cathedrals, what was left were skeletons of buildings, and their bleakness was captured by both Shakespeare and, later, Wordsworth.  The entire Catholic world was overturned, and the spiritual desolation of the worshipers must have been horrifying.  They were, however, in the minority.  Worse was to come.

I first read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in the original French, and sadly, spent so much time grappling with the translation of the 19th-century French that I never did appreciate the novel fully.  In fact, I wondered what all the fuss was about:  the novel, by modern standards, was hopelessly long-winded, had all sorts of irrelevant characters to the plot, and so on.  Then, some dozen years later, I found a brilliant translation and read that, and all my earlier scorn for Hugo disappeared.

In that monumental work was the entire catalog of human existence:  love, death, betrayal, forgiveness, venality, cruelty, compassion and kindness, to name but some.  The panoply of Man’s humanity and inhumanity was all there, laid out like a feast on a table, all for the reader’s tasting;  and then came Inspector Javert.

Suddenly, there was a sinister addition to Hugo’s comédie humaine:  the State. The State, with all its papers, its registrations, its mindless bureaucracy, and its wheels of justice, grinding slow and grinding extremely small.  Suddenly, the story of Jean Valjean, which could have been told in just about any age, now became a modern story.  And suddenly, the balance between justice and mercy, once the provenance of God, had been transferred to the State – and the State, as personified by Javert, had no mercy, only justice.

The order of the world had been overturned;  the old order had disappeared, and been replaced with something different, something ineffably worse.

At first, I thought that this was it:  one world had ended, another had taken its place, and sure, Hugo’s work was fiction after all, and such wrenching change was uncommon, perhaps a once-in-several-millenia occurrence.

Five years later I read the Loss Of Eden trilogy by John Masters.  In Eden, Masters describes in minute and appalling detail how an entire civilization disappeared as a result of the First World War.  Like the appearance of the impersonal State bureaucracy in Hugo, the modern manifestation of the State was its impersonal application of technology to the wholesale slaughter of the opposing army.  In Les Misérables, the bureaucrat Javert at least had the option of solving an insoluble conundrum by his own suicide.  No such option existed for the generals on the Western Front.  The result was the disappearance of an entire generation of young men, a decimation or worse of lower- or middle-class youth, and the virtual disappearance of the upper class, doomed by their class and upbringing to lead their men into the hot mouths of the machine guns, and to suffer disproportionately.

At a stroke, the old ruling class disappeared, whether by slaughter on the Western Front, or by revolution in Russia.  In its place came the modern government bureaucracy:  more faceless than before, more powerful than before.  The post-Great War government was to rule not by divine dogma, nor even by royal whim, but by cold, impersonal philosophy.  After the Great War, literature (and the arts in general) fell into the hopeless nihilism of Dada and the antiwar horror of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front.  The Second World War, a continuation of the Great War’s slaughter, was brought to its apogee by the killing of thousands by a single bomb, twice.  What the Second World War enabled was the growth of the Leviathan state, with its impersonal bureaucracy (like mass destruction) brought to its ultimate conclusion.  Instead of the post-Great War Dadaism, post-Second World War literature was defined by bleak dystopian visions like George Orwell’s 1984 and absurdist plays like Samuel Becket’s Waiting For Godot. 

Movies have progressed into huge, totalitarian productions like Avatar and Titanic, winning awards not because of their literary or cinematic brilliance, but because of their astronomical production costs.  As a reaction, my taste in movies has moved towards the little, personal movies like Sideways and The Cooler.  In contrast, however, my taste in literature has been influenced by the immensity of Les Misérables and Loss Of Eden, where whole societies come to an end, and the misery of human existence is captured in all its facets. 

I have no idea how much the Information Revolution is going to change society.  All I know is that it will.  However, if I want to see how we will be affected by the next overturning of society, and get an idea of the misery we will endure, I just have to re-read Les Misérables and Loss Of Eden.

This time, Shakespeare’s “bare ruin’d choirs” will not be in our buildings, but in our souls. 

I wrote this in late 2010.  As far as I can tell, not much has changed since then.

The Layabout Sailor

Friends and Family, Tragedy

Longtime Readers may recall that a bunch of my friends and I used to get together once a year for the Feinstein-Daley Memorial Shoot at the east Texas ranch of Reader Airboss (sadly, since deceased).  It was always a festive affair and featured the occasional gun.

It was at one such event where I met Doc Russia, at the time still a med student at UT-Houston, who had a blog entitled Bloodletting (which I miss dreadfully, even though I still see him regularly for shooting and dinners etc.).  Another blogger also came along at that same meeting:  Jim Siegler from Smoke On The Water, which featured guns, politics and details of his life on board his beloved yacht, the sloop New Dawn.

While Doc was an excellent shot, Jim was likewise;  actually, Jim was easily the best all-round shooter — pistol, revolver, rifle and shotgun — I’ve ever met.


(that’s a youthful Son&Heir spotting for him, btw)

We played all sorts of shooty games, potting bowling pins and plinking at golf balls.

If not doing that, we “tested” each others’ guns (uh huh) and shot impromptu IDPA- or rimfire rifle competitions.  In the former, the competition was usually between Jim and Doc;  with the .22, I was occasionally able to keep up, but mostly, it was always Jim.  Not even the S&H — a competition handgun shooter — could match him, especially when Jim unholstered that ancient and worn S&W Model 14 (K-38 Masterpiece), his favorite gun.

It’s probably true to say that some of the best shooting fun I’ve ever had was with this man, because over the past two or so decades whenever he came up to Dallas or I went down to Galveston, we sent many thousands of rounds downrange together.  To call us “shooting buddies” would be a total understatement.

Then he met a lovely woman, and his life was complete.  (I nicknamed her “Irish” because of her thick, occasionally impenetrable Belfast accent.)

Then Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2009.  It destroyed the New Dawn, which ended up in pieces closer to Houston than to Galveston.  Jim’s normal procedure when faced with storms was simply to batten down and ride it out;  but this time, for some reason, he and Irish left Galveston and stayed with friends up in Livingston.  Had he stayed on the yacht, as he usually did, he would have perished.

Afterwards, Jim and Irish bought a small house, still on Galveston Island — which itself was almost destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.  When the floodwaters receded, they discovered that the insurance would only cover repairs up to the sub-floor;  so Jim rebuilt the rest of the place himself, carefully and meticulously:  floors, kitchen and bathrooms.

In fact, “meticulous” was a word that could describe Jim best:  his house looked as though it had been put together by a master builder, his guns were all in perfect working order, his reloaded ammo was faultless and wonderfully consistent, and his various trucks looked brand new even though they were decidedly not, and all ran like a sewing machine.

I need to make a comment at this point.  Frequent Readers of this website may remember that I have always referred to Jim as “the Layabout Sailor”.  That was a total lie, because Jim was one of the hardest-working men I’ve ever come across, and the ironic nickname was the complete antithesis of him.  Having come from extreme poverty — his first job was washing dishes at a restaurant, at age eight — Jim worked his whole life at a number of jobs, sometimes two at a time:  insurance adjuster, car salesman, bus driver, roofer, whatever paid the bills.  He used to joke that his best-paying job was when he enlisted in the Air Force in his late teens, so you get the idea.  College was never an option because there was little money and he refused to get into debt.  But he was always well-groomed and impeccably dressed — and by the way, very intelligent, well-read and well-spoken, his soft Texas drawl a welcome sound always, along with his impish sense of humor.   (His online signature: “Jim S.– Sloop New Dawn” became “Jim S. — Sunk New Dawn”, which masked his despair at the tragedy of its loss.)

Last November Jim wrote to me to tell me that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s Disease — and of course as we all know, ALS is incurable.  His prognosis was grim — perhaps two years — but the cruelest part was that while ALS can affect both the brain and the muscular system, Jim’s brain was completely unaffected.  So his body was starting to collapse, leaving his lively, intelligent brain intact.  He became weak and his speech began to slur.

Doc Russia and I visited him in April this year following a warning from an alarmed Combat Controller;  and while Jim was in bad shape, he was still able to get around with a walker — we went to his local bar in the evening, and to his favorite breakfast place the next morning — but his speech was barely intelligible, and Irish had to translate much of it for us.  He was much thinner, of course, because he wasn’t able to eat much.  But we left him doing okay, albeit a shadow of his former self, and were comforted by the fact that we’d be able to see him again over the next year or so, at least.  We were wrong.

My friend Jim died two weeks ago, in late June 2025, after only nine months since his diagnosis.  Rather than a slow decline, his condition simply went over a cliff, and he died of pulmonary failure, as his lungs — even with a respirator — ceased to function.

And the world became a little worse for his passing.

Of course, Irish’s world became a lot worse, because Jim had been her whole life, and her his.  New Wife and I spent this last July 4th long weekend with her down in Galveston, and to see one of the nicest people I know in such a state of unutterable grief has taken my normal good humor completely away.  To put it bluntly, I’m in a state of deep melancholy, and it’s going to take a little while before I feel better.  Expect blogging to be light for the rest of this week — most of what will appear is post-dated — while I try to come to terms with all this.  Details will follow when I’m able to tell them.

So long Jim, you rotten layabout.