From Ben Franklin & Nimitz to RFK, Jr.

Politics, Wars, Censorship, Dead and Dying Bodies

1/24/2024

This quote today triggered many blue sky memories from the last four years I was physically and mentally surrounded by people who never gave up fighting against the most powerful people determined to stamp out human rights. Warriors who show us how to win the fiercest battles.

   "If we are resigned to the belief that the parasite class have everything in place and cannot be stopped, then we will, absolutely, will that reality into existence. Every passing pessimistic remark we make, leads to apathetic and defeatist behaviour, followed by our actions manifesting in everyday life." 

- https://nicholascreed.substack.com/p/fighting-against-hopelessness-apathy (Posted on “Coffee & Covid” Substack 1/24/24 in readers’ comments)

Been thinking a lot this month about Benjamin Franklin as the 2024 US Presidential race begins to burn red hot.  His final will and codicil made clear he thought the brand new USA bureaucracy would inevitably run amok so badly we’d have to fight again to keep our liberties.  He bequeathed the bulk of his estate when he died in 1790 to Boston and Philadelphia, the cities of his birth and adulthood.  Each was to invest those assets and use the compounding interest to fund trade apprenticeships. He gambled tradespeople would be effective fighters to defend the human rights defined by him and his fellow drafters of the US Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.

He had been an apprentice printer himself after his father could no longer afford to pay for any education for him past age 10.  His father dreamed Ben would become a Quaker clergyman but without more school education in those days it was impossible. His father bound him at age 12 to a labor contract with his older brother, James.  Ben ran away to Philadelphia at age 17, becoming a criminal fugitive with a price on his head payable to anyone who brought him back to his brother.  Why did he run away?  James refused to let him publish more writings too critical of the British Governor of Massachusetts. The Governor could shut down the printing shop for treason. 

James had already been imprisoned for three weeks in 1722 for publishing what he did not know were anonymous writings by Ben critical of the Governor.  While the brother was in prison, Ben as “Mrs. Dogood” published a quote from Cato’s Letters, “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, was founded in 1682 by William Penn, a Quaker like Ben, who valued religious freedom.  Penn came of age during the English Civil War which executed a king and experimented with a protestant Puritan commonwealth government, and then he helped support financially the bankrupted and restored monarchy. His family’s grand and elegant country estate is just a few miles north of Windsor Castle. No surprise when Ben died in 1790, Philly thanks to over a hundred years of defending religious freedom had a massive parade in his honor with Quaker leaders, other Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and rabbis leading the way marching together. A contrast to the protestant Church of England headed to this day by Britain’s crowned sovereign.

In 1757, the Pennsylvania Colony sent Franklin to London to try to convince the British Parliament to make Thomas Penn, the living holder of the old Penn family’s royal charter to found a colony in the Americas, pay land taxes to the colony’s government. The multi-generational, inter-marriage’d, primogenitor, and aristocratic system of Britain meant Franklin despite 15 years of trying could never get his British royal sovereign’s chartered subject to pay any colonial land taxes. Nor get any traction once he was also the representative agent for three other colonies, including Massachusetts, to stop unduly burdensome London Parliament and government actions such as the tea monopoly granted to the British East Indies chartered company. A slightly hypocritical position for Franklin because he made his biggest personal fortune serving as a colonial postmaster with as legalized monopoly.

In his will, Franklin disowned his son who stayed on the Loyalist side through and after the American Revolution. A son born out of wedlock and appointed the Royal Governor of the New Jersey Colony in 1763 owing his income and social position to the King of England. Our Revolutionary War tore families apart when fewer than 10% ever took up arms or provided other overt support to fight for the novel concept of God-given inalienable human rights.

Instead, the Loyalists supported rights and privileges granted or taken away by a human royal sovereign’s whim or the back room deals of Parliament to favor investors of chartered monopolistic companies, all enforced by petty beneficiaries and willing enablers like New Jersey Royal Governor, the young Franklin. Too many colonials just metaphorically stuck a cold and wet finger into the stiff winds to see which wind direction seemed to be the strongest and thus turned to join that side like a herd of easily scared prey animals. Hundreds of red coated British Empire soldiers? They look like the strongest team. “Ra! ra!,” them. “We’re Number 1!”

The American Revolutionaries in the 13 Colonies who took up arms or gave the patriots any material support were we ms remind ourselves as we approach the 250th anniversary of 1776 at best 10% of the population who realized the British king and his parliament were incorrigible tyrants. That low percentage does not surprise me after studying three years ago the Asch and Milgram experiments proving the majority of humans - about 64% - will follow a group or authority figures’ beliefs even if those beliefs are patently false or demonstrably lethal to fellow humans. For example Milgram (Yale 1961), let someone wearing a doctor’s white coat tell a human test subject to zap a person in another room with electricity until that fellow human medical research subject screams. Over 60% will do it. 14 of 40 laughed or smiled while zapping another human. Over 60% were willing to administer an electrical shock they were explicitly told was lethal. Asch (Swarthmore 1951), was a visual test where a similar 60%+ of test subjects are easily peer pressured to uphold a clear lie by just group dynamics, not just by only one person such as Milgram with a white lab coat ordering them to do something.

***

2020-2024 from the Point of View of Benjamin Franklin

I shudder to think how families in the USA have been torn apart since 2020 when our human rulers decided a “novel corona virus” required shutting down most small businesses forcing many into bankruptcy. Every restaurant forced to sell only take-out food. Every bookstore declared a “non-essential business” but, curiously, not the biggest online book sellers or book aisles in big box companies like Walmart. I had a book on order from a small independent Palo Alto bookshop before my County shut down on March 17, 2020. I could not get it until after June 2021 when its independent bookstores’ warehouse was able to reopen.

Stop all recreational travel. Close all public beaches in California but for in one County whose sheriff said essentially, “Nuts to that! Vitamin D from sunlight, fresh air and exercise are great for human immune systems!”

Close all gyms, ice rinks and other indoor sport facilities. School buildings all closed. Bars shut and marijuana dispensaries closed. But, winery tasting rooms like the one owned by the California Governor stayed open.

Lock the doors of all churches. No open air religious worship gathering was allowed. Only one church in my County of Santa Clara in California, Calvary in San Jose, dared not to close their doors and racked up $100,000 of fines and is still fighting in court to get those fines revoked. I made a point of going to a public lecture at that church in Summer 2021 when County indoor mask “mandates” were still in force. Neither I nor anyone else wore a mask there indoors. We listened to Dr. Simone Gold speak about the best treatments proven to work on covid.\and the molecular danager of the new “vaccines” for it. Ild seen her n RTV in summer 2020 speaking with other doctors on the steps of the US Suprem Court. she was a couple years later thrown into jail for merely speaking about medical freedom outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In Silicon Valley most software programers and computer hardware designers started work-from-home which ran for over three years until those companies threatened employees with firing unless they came back to face-to-face work. That work-from-home for most white glove workers resulted in our mass transit commuter trains from San Francisco to San José to stop all express train service. Its passenger numbers are still down about 30% as of this year. A semi-scandal in 2024 when a local newspaper exposed the fact not one conductor over several days checked for fares being paid by train riders.

All city, town and county planning departments shut down in California by mid-March 2020. If you needed an inspector to sign off on completed construction or process a new building permit you had to wait about 5 months past November 2020 when they started to work again (from home) after finally allowing building permits and plans to be processed electronically instead of on paper. Many similar government workers were paid for doing in fact nothing while staying at home.

All elected local city and county councils met only by Zoom for more than 2.5 years. Courts ended jury trials. Toss out the door your Bill of Rights protections of a meaningful Us Constitutinal Right to Petion any fgovernemtn for redress, or a right to a speedy trial or a jury of your peers for a criminal case. It took more than two years for most all my local elected leaders to have any in-person meetings again instead of “Zooming” in online from anywhere on the planet.

Face masks required if away from a 6 person “bubble.” People thus forced to reduce their human support networks. Depend on another government dole of tax dollars to “stay home.” People forced to die alone in hospitals treated as if lepers in Biblical times.

Injections and “negative” tests for an often “asymptomatic” disease to do many activities. It took at least 3 years for US federal health authorities to admit they never had any proof Covid could be transmssble an “asymptomatic” disease. Not one governement official in the entire world could produce a covid sampl n a petri deihs for those fghting for human righst to stop the madness. Turns out it was just a computer code for an RNa sequence developed in US and Chinese labs as a bioweapon countermeasure for gain-of-function-lab-made molecules. All patented by 2019 complete with a genetic sequence to trigger cancers. “Vaccines” for this “novel virus” were rolled out for mass use by December 2021, authorised for “emergency” use and all sold under US government military prototype contracts which did not need to work as advertized or as “tested.”

I’ve fantsized a lot since March 2020 about boiling up some tar and plucking birds for their feathers so I could tar & feather an ever growing list of the people ressponsible for this horror show as a cascade of very early deaths from the jabbed shows up in statistics. A booweapon with a kill time of often less than 14 days but an increasing number of those stricken with turbo cancers, heart and nerve lethal damage, and the white rubbery “calamari” clots killing them years after their last jabs.

For almost 2 years, required legally experimental genetic cocktail injections to get aboard an airliner or keep a job as state and federal officials colluded with internet, mass media, and big pharmaceutical companies to censor Free Speech by deplatforming and demonetizing anyone lek Dr. Gold critical of the political and bureaucratic “pandemic” response.  Most TV and newspaper news, and live sporting events “Brought to you!” by pharmaceutical companies or other businesses owned by their interlocked boards and investors.

Working in real estate, I had to have a flurry of forms signed by anyone seeing a property for sale or rent. A blizzard of different signs at each property and my office. Local realtors’ trade guild board “mandated” I had to wipe down every surface visitors, employees, and I touched. I quickly noticed every plumber, electrician, gardener, dry waller, painter, roofer or others who worked with their hands would take off their masks as soon as I said they need not wear it in front of me. We had a lot of laughs and smiles together. I stopped doing the wipe downs and masking pretty quickly once I realized such “mandates” were not legally enforceable.

At one point around June 2021 my County demanded every business poll each worker for their novel injection status and keep monthly records of that medical data. The County went too far with that new “mandate” involving medical privacy. It was quietly stopped after a few weeks. I’d already told my employees they could tell me to shove it because there would never be from me a requirement to tell me anything about their medical status. I trusted them to follow the Golden Rule. Period.

What would Ben Franklin say about all of this? Like a slap across the face, this quote popped into my mind from my father’s namesake:

    “There are men running governments who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches.” 

- Will Rogers

Ben Franklin bargained as he faced death that free and skilled tradesman, trained by apprenticeships, would be a bulwark for keeping our human freedoms while his colleague Thomas Jefferson counted on yeoman farmers who owned their own land never to be tenants, serfs, or slaves subjected to any land master. Control your own livelihood and/or land, and then you can stand up easier to any tyrants and despots.

On April 17, 1890, exactly 100 years after Franklin’s death he directed Boston and Philadelphia to do what they wanted with the principal of his estate.  Boston chose to spend its Franklin cash on swamp draining to create its Back Bay neighborhood and its Olmsted-designed chain of green parks.  Philadelphia set up the Franklin Institute still flourishing today.  The social, economic, and political scientific experiments set up in his final will are still running today.

***

Elections, Wars and War Surplus

This morning, I woke up to the news Mr. Donald Trump won the 2024 New Hampshire Republican Party primary.  A man who grew up working in his father’s construction business.  His father grew up hiding and denying his German ancestry after the intense anti-German propaganda spun by President Wilson’s new public relations hire Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays to convince Americans to enter WW1 after they’d just voted Wilson his second term on a platform to keep the USA out of WW1. 

“Uncle Sam Needs You!”  “Kill the Huns!!!” on posters of German soldiers with blood dripping out of their mouths dragging semi-naked women by their hair.  “Remember the Lusitania!”  “Buy War Bonds!” The brand new federal income tax will end “After the War is Over!”  “The War to End All Wars!!” Is your heart racing now after reading those dramatic words? Each carefully selected to make people emotional and thus, disable their critical thinking brain cells. Push them into a state of fear or hatred to induce an emotional simple reptilial brain’s flee or fight reaction just like the constant scroll of “COVID POSITIVE TEST NUMBERS TODAY” and “DEATH COUNTS” at the bottom of every USA television news screen 2020-2021.

In Summer 2022, my County of Santa Clara, California which organized the first USA’s regional counties lockdowns staring March 17, 2020 quietly admitted it had over counted its 2020 “Covid deaths” by at least 22%. It got at least $30,000 cash from the federal government for every County death “with Covid” in the three underfunded County owned hostipals” after one positive spit or nose juice test. In July 2022, the US FDA quietly published a notice in the Federal Register revoking almost all its emergency use authorizations for the majority of Covid tests in use stating they were useless thanks to too may false-postive results. Revocation to be effective December 31, 2022 after more of the useless tests already in consumers’ hands and in shops for sale were used up.

Propaganda spin continues to this day. “Get your booster!” after being told in early 2021 “One and done! Two if J&J. Then, we can ALL get back to normal!!” “To save grandma!” “Do your part!” “Safe and effective.” A few weeks later you need a booster. A couple months more another booster. Now, at least an annual booster. The gullible sheeple lined up to get their Russian Roulette boosters.

Just like being a paying spectator fan in a professional football stadium conditioned with commercial business propaganda, a.k.a. marketing spin and psy-op warfare techniques, to be “One Big Team!” To scream,“WE’RE Number One!!” in a frenzy yelling for “our” team to tackle whichever “enemy” has the ball. Fans wearing their favorite players’ jerseys and team colors as profits roll in to professional “sporting” legal monopoly “entertainment” franchises - not “sports” leagues - such as the NFL. Players crippled for life on the gridiron or brain concussed one to many times? Bring in another fungible piece of meat (cough, gladiator) for the bread & circus blood-lust show. Proudly show your lastest booster jab site bandaid!! “You are On the Team!!!!”

***

When a war of any kind is over, including a pro sport “war” on a grassy playing field, who exactly are the biggest winners and biggest losers? That’s one way to identify parasites, both those of accidental opportunity or born one.

I’ve a relative, Henry J. Pope, who made a fortune selling soldiers’ socks to the US government in WW1 after rescuing his father’s textile company from bankruptcy caused another employee’s embezzlement.  Many of his WW1 socks were left in federal warehouses when the war ended. Warehouses were also overflowing with new experimental inoculations and other serums not used on US soldiers.

Curiously, many civilians who got those surplus injections after the war was over developed the “Spanish Flu” which had first appeared as far as the public was told at Ft. Riley in Kansas which conducted one of the largest first mass novel inoculations of US soldiers.  Many people also died of the Spanish Flu after being lethally overdosed by unwitting doctors proscribing the new-ish miracle drug called aspirin which causes severe lung damage.. Spanish Flu rates around the world were low to nonexistent in places where people got few to no novel injections or did not take large quantities of aspirin. The “Spanish" flu label because that country was neutral in WW1 and thus did not have much wartime propaganda or press censorship.

By the 1930’s Mr. Pope, a distant cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose Delano family first got rich running opium to China, was helping to fund FDR’s polio rehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Georgia.  Pope had a daughter with polio and one of his factories made a knitted pressure garment to help her and other polio victims to recover. He bonded close on a personal level with polio victim FDR.

FDR had a legendary fight with the US Geological Service when he wanted US government support for his new polio facility. He was convinced its springs produced - I’m not making this up! - “square” bubbles more useful to polio victims than round bubbles detailed in Princeton professor and “New Yorker” writer John McPhee in one of his books. FDR died at Warm Springs with his long time mistress, a fact long suppressed by his era’s “Gentlemen’s” press.

I recall Pope may have been one of FDR’s WW2 dollar-a-year men for military procurement. At least one of his very wealthy female descendants from Southern California ended up being a very good friend of President Eisenhower who behind the scenes was quite a happy partier with the ladies. All totally innocent fun or at least extremely discrete fun. Got that tidbit over lunch in San Diego Summer 2022 from the SoCal author of a biography about Henry’s sister, Ida Pope, who helped start the first prep school in Hawaii for Hawaiian girls and witnessed first hand the Yankee sugar cartel end the Hawaiian monarchy. George Carlin the comedian said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”

A WW1 surplus relic sits in my home office on a bookshelf.  A US Army soldier’s WW1 metal helmet, painted by the WW2 US federal Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) with a silhouette of a chemical glass retort.  The helmet was used by my mother’s father at the US Rubber factory in Passaic, New Jersey where he worked as a chemist and served as an OCD chemical response volunteer in case the factory was shelled or bombed when German wolf pack submarines were sinking ships deep inside New York City’s harbors.

OCD was in many ways a psy-op created to get civilian support for the USA to enter WW2.  The “War is Coming!!” and “All hands on deck!” spirit. “We’re in this together!” OCD was established before the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.  It’s first boss was sitting Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City.  Its next was James Landis, a political protege of FDR’s New Deal for Wall Street securities laws who favored only “voluntary” government registration by securities issuers. He was pushed out of his OCD office after an affair with his executive secretary.

How do I know that salacious personal detail?  I met through a relative who took me to a Washington, D.C. book reading by one of her author friends, one of his children, the now deceased writer Ann McLaughlin, days after I’d plowed through the entire paper contents of her father’s OCD office held by the US National Archives while researching the December 1, 1941 founding of the OCD’s Civil Air Patrol (CAP). I’d read her semi-autobiographical book of fiction “The House on Q Street” (2002) after her family’s WW2 experience and we started to chat. Oddly worded letters in the Archives files by her father’s secretary had stuck in my brain such as his letter written to CAP leadership saying the only thing he’d miss after leaving OCD was flying on CAP aircraft. He was shuffled off to a US government job in North Africa. After WW2, He ended up being a private legal advisor to Joseph Kennedy and then to his son President JFK helping with his first Presidential campaign. JFK fired him after someone blabbed he’d not filed tax returns for 3 years starting in the late 1950’s.

An irony, Ann met her husband when both were struck down by a polio outbreak in the mid-1950’s. She wrote a semi-autobiographical book about that experience. My parents’ best man at their wedding, Bruce Hutchinson, had also been struck down in a post WW2 polio outbreak. I grew up learning from him about the horrors of that disease. Is it really from a virus or could it just be Guillain Barré Syndrome caused by, one theory goes, a misfolded prion which might be triggered by a DDT poisoning or some novel injections such as the kind FDR got to travel to France during WW1 as a Department of the Navy political appointee. He nearly died of double pneumonia “Spanish” flu on his voyage home. Or, perhaps a chemical weapons exposure in WW1? A man-made pesticide “forever” chemical from his visit to a Scout camp right before he came down with polio? And/or a heavy metals poisoning such as aluminum adn mercury put into many vaccines as an adjuvant?

My polymer chemist grandfather used for hiking all his life a US Army WW1 surplus steel drinking cup he hooked on his belt. A stainless steel WW2 Army canteen, plate and eating utensils. He refused to allow any Teflon pans in his home. Or aluminum for cooking acidic foods. At home he only drank tap water allowed to settle particulates and outgas chlorine overnight.

He also used for over 30 years a WW2 surplus two-man US Army tent for canoe camping. Dark green, thick oil or wax coated canvas. His canoe was aluminum made by the Grumman company which retooled some of its factories after WW2 from fighter planes to consumer goods. He last used his old Army tent on a 1979 trip we took to the Sierra Nevada crest near Mt. Goddard when we had mules and donkeys to carry such a heavy tent. He loved to get to high places to cogitate with ultra long views or get to any wilderness place. He’d also cary for reading matter chemical journals. Tearing out and throwing each article in the fire after he read it. He never acted impulsively.

For “kicks” the US government during WW2 made its civilians use food and gasoline ration books not due to any actual food or fuel shortages but as “We’re in this together!” propaganda and a bit of population movement control. “Give your train seat to soldiers!” “Collect your bacon grease to make into munitions!” “Grow a Victory Garden at home!” “Do YOUR part!!”

There was no need for tire rationing which continued through WW2 once US Rubber and Goodyear companies vastly improved the synthetic rubber trade secrets from I.G. Farben in Germany obtained via an April 1942 Congressional hearing which - publicly - forced them out of the hands of President Bush, Sr.’s father, the “fall guy” Prescott Bush. He then worked for a New York City investment company which held those trade secrets as collateral for loans to that German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. Bush’s employer company was mostly owned by Averell Harriman, an heir as a child to a railroad fortune and later Secretary of Commerce for President Harry Truman. After WW2, Prescott was elected a US Senator for Connecticut. My grandparents never owned a car until after WW2 ended.  At first being married in the Great Depression because they could not afford it and later in WW2 because not owning or using a private car was considered patriotic, at least for the masses. Both of them loathed FDR for many of his economic and war policies.

***

Elections from Coastal Points of View

Who won yesterday’s New Hampshire Democrat Party presidential primary?  Does it matter?  The party’s White House incumbent was on the ballot only as a last minute write-in. Reid Hoffman, a founder of Linkedin company and a top Democrat donor, who hosted at least two invitational California pricey fundraisers for Mr. Joe Biden in 2023 funded a big mass media and direct mail campaign for New Hampshire Democrat Party voters to switch their voting party registrations to Republican and vote for Mrs. Nikki Haley to try to weaken the surge of Mr. Trump.

The Democrat Party’s rules committee last year with long time member Mr. James Roosevelt the Third, a grandson of FDR, rigged their party primaries’ rules to try to make it easier for their incumbent president to avoid any challengers. They voted if any Democrat Presidential candidates campaign in New Hampshire in its September 2024 primary, a State where “their boy” did not do well 2020, that even if they campaign and win, their New Hampshire votes would not go to any Democrat Summer 2024 convention delegates who decide who will automatically be on all the 50 state ballots in November 2024 for the Democrats’ nominated president and vice president candidates. These political plot twists are so bizarre I keep expecting a Monty Python comedic Spanish Inquisition team to burst through my home’s front door suggesting I be tortured with “The comfy chair!” And, a recurring vision of King Canute on an English beach demonstrating his secular powers had no ability to stop an incoming tide.

“James Roosevelt, III.” Why does that remind me of King George III of Britain who supposedly said George Washington would be the “greatest man who ever lived” if he voluntarily left the office of the US President after two terms when he could have being so popular and without term limits stayed legally for life and selected his successor.

Washington openly hated all political parties. He’d watched Ben Franklin get rolled by the Tory and Whig uni-parties in London before 1776. Warned us in his Farewell Address to avoid all “foreign entanglements.”  What would he think of our standing active duty US Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Space Force 800+ bases in countless countries all around the planet? And, sending US Coast Guard ships far, far away from USA shores such as to the China Sea?

Washington genuinely preferred not being a solider or president but instead being at home experimenting with new crops and making new food products to make his Mount Vernon plantation more profitable.  A man who when chairing the debates to write our US Constitution in Philadelphia never entered into the debates.

I’ve been to his home twice, once leading a group of junior high school students in 1989/90 where I had to chase one kid down to get on the bus back to school when she was dallying all alone in the vegetable garden. She was from an evangelical black church whose parents later asked me while teaching geology to include the Genesis story which I happily did. Who can, I thought as a scientis, humanist and Christian, say for sure how long a “day” is for the God of Genesis?

I wish I could turn back the clock for more time to have talked with her in that garden. What did she think about George and Martha Washington? All the other people who had lived on that land? That trip made me think for the first time what do we teach our nation’s children about Mr. Washington, the man.

What sticks most in my mind about Mt. Vernon are the rooms where he lived and worked.  His home office with a wall of cabinets where he kept endless correspondence with his London agents and anyone interested in finding new plants to grow for profits.  His dining room where he loved to have long meals and talks with friends. A fireplace where he and/or his widow burned all their personal correspondence before they died.  Neither considered themselves to be “royal.”   Neither thought of themselves as an elite indispensable person worthy of any eternal hagiography. George Washington left no blood children of his own, just step-kids from his wife’s first marriage.  He’d seen his older brother Lawrence, from whom he’d inherited Mt. Vernon, die a horrid death young of tuberculosis. He knew life is short and can be cruel.

A fellow CAP volunteer lawyer and pilot, a gentleman with a lovely accent from the Old South from Louisiana after reading this essay reminded me George Washington was not, as I’d agree, a Mr. Perfect. Had he not been a “nobody” middling-sized plantation owning colonial he might have been able to buy higher rank in the British Army in which he had served and made a life career there. He had a fox hunting neighbor friend Colonel William Fairfax who helped George in his British Army career. If allowed to marry the rich Colonel Cary’s daughter Sally who married one of Colonel Fairfax’ sons and thus became a sister in-law to Lawrence Washington, George might have been a Loyalist lifer. Instead, he married the rich widow Martha and adopted her grandson George Washington “Wash"“ Parke Custis who had children at Mt. Vernon with at least two of the Washington family slaves (Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016). At least three people have family history claiming descent from General George Washington via Venus, a slave, but so far DNA testing is not conclusive (Baltimore Sun, August 19, 1999) . It’s harder every year for old family secrets to stay hidden!

When I taught high school geology and human biology I lived in Alexandria, Virginia a few blocks away from the church where the Washingtons worshipped. A Civil War Confederate solider statue stood facing the Old South in the middle of the main north-south street running by the church.  Every school day I zipped by that statue, the Pentagon, across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge, through Georgetown named for a British king, past the Soviet Embassy with its roof stuffed with sensors, and up to the tallest hill in all of Washington, D.C. set aside by George Washington himself while serving as the first US president. His first job was being a surveyor. That tall hill’s large plot of land he designated to have a church for all Americans, the National Cathedral for our Capitol’s literal high ground.

Monday mornings I’d sometimes accompany my National Cathedral School (NCS) for Girls students to their weekly “cathedral” service. Their school was founded for poor daughters of episcopal ministers with its first big building, Hearst Hall, paid for by William Randolph Hearst’s mother. Her husband, George, made his fortune mining gold in South Dakota (“thx” US Army for defeating the local people trying to hold on to land they consider very sacred) and then was appointed to a vacant US Senate seat for California. Buying one’s big government job like British Army officers had to do in the late 1700’s. Senators Hearst and Leland “Railroad Robber Baron” Stanford of California competed for who missed the most Senate votes. I suspect that “winner” was Senator William “Copper King” Clark who said, “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”

By the time I was teaching there was almost always in an NCS hallway at least one Secret Service bodyguard for a student or at the St. Albans Boys school on the other side of the cathedral. While I worked at NCS, VP Dan Quayle’s son was at St. Albans. I was not impressed with his manners when he dumped as his invite to a school dance at the last minute one of my eighth grade students replacing her with a prettier and richer girl. The story came out in a lab class when the dumped girl was crying uncontrollably and the richer girl was smiling with her Mean Girls clique. I said loudly to the crying girl, “Good riddance! With behavior like that he’s NOT worth your time!” She brightened up, smiled, and finished her lab work. The girl with the glossy thick long brown and wavy hair gave me a wide berth for the rest of that year.

In spring 1990, I listened to a lecture by St. Alban’s alum “Al” Gore, Jr. whose father Albert Arnold Gore, Sr. had been a US Representative and Senator (1939-1971). Al, Sr. of Tennessee voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and after it passed he supported improved civil rights. After losing reelection in 1971 he joined he board of Occidental Petroleum, a Delaware company, run by Armand Hammer whose father had been a major financier and money launderer for the Bolsheviks. Armand after 1971 signed huge petrochemical and port infrastructure development and trade deals with the USSR and Libya.

Al, Jr. in 1990 was a US Senator and future VP who had two daughters at NCS. When I there one of those girls declined to finish her science fair project on time. Her science teacher, not me, did the bulk of the work for her. The faculty break room was abuzz. A simple one page survey of faculty asking who got the latest annual flu shot and who later caught the flu. I would have failed her on that assignment for her failure to do the work. Al, Jr. served in the US military doing one year in Vietnam as a headquarters public affairs enlistee. “Veteran” ticket punched for his future political career.

In Spring 1990, Al, Jr. gave an Earth Day lecture at NCS for the student body. I stood in the back with most of the math and science department teachers. He said such nonsense most of us quietly walked out en masse. The majority of our students’ parents made their living as federal employees, lawyers or lobbyists. Few were Catholics or Jewish. Even fewer kids “of color.” At the autumn 1989 Back to School Night at my earth and human science classes only one parent dared to ask me a question. He was a heart surgeon.

The salaries paid to the teaching staff were a joke. Most teachers had other sources of income to be able to live in the D.C. metro area. A mental “golden handcuffs” college prep school in a large beautiful garden and forest paradise where the bosses considered it an “honor” to teach there. I lasted just one year and declined to take an offered contract for the next year.

I stood outside the cathedral the day the last stone finial was raised to the top of the northwest tower as a small crowd watched including incumbent US President Bush the First.  I’d become a friend of the stone carvers to get rock samples for my students hence my invite to that ceremony where I stood with the carvers. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to a sitting US President.

I’ll never forget one school morning seeing Secret Service look under my car with a mirror and a sniffer dog after parking at my usual spot by a semi-outdoor small chapel the day of a big cathedral service Bush Sr. attended. Right by a big side door used by most Presidents and a short walk to my office and classroom. A state funeral or memorial service that day. That cathedral ground’s paved road was removed a few years later to make space for a new underground garage.

Inside the main nave is a tomb or sarcophagus of President Woodrow Wilson. It always exuded bad vibes whenever I touched it. Never saw any flowers on it. A man unloved and mostly forgotten. Near it is a stained glass window with a Moon rock collected by Astronaut Mike Collins’s Apollo 11 crew mates in 1969. A graduate of St. Albans in 1948, his father and an uncle were both US Army generals, the latter the Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War. I’ve always admired Mike for his courage in space exploration and his skill as a test pilot and writer. The Space Race: a peaceful proxy battlefront of the Cold War. In retirement from flying and space travel Mike spearheaded the construction of the National Air & Space Museum, and then retired to Florida and a Boston suburb.

At the now Mt. Vernon museum, Mr. George Washington as my fellow student of science and nature, and like Mike Collins a military officer in wartime, he knew his soil was very weak from too many decades of growing tobacco and knew the slave economy of his home state of Virginia was another long term disaster.  He freed all the slaves he personally owned in his final will and urged his wife to free hers when she died. He like so many others fought willingly and hard to make a “more perfect union” at the risk of his life, his family, and fortune.

 ***

An East Coast Transplant to Southern California

I watched online live in April 2023 as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his candidacy for the US Presidency in Boston. My parents took me to that town when I was a very small child. We walked the streets of the old city with my Dad’s brother who lived nearby with his wife. I learned about the Boston Tea Party and stood on the site of the Boston Massacre. As a high school student my aunt (or my Mom’s college friend Anne?) living in a Boston suburb took me to walk at Lexington and Concord where the locals took up arms against George III’s Red Coat soldiers. I stood on the village green where “the shot heard around the world” was fired. Ghosts surrounded me.

As an adult, on a business trip I spent a day visiting the Boston suburban homes of President John Adams, his parents, and the home library built by his son John Quincy. Family friends living in nearby Newton took me to see the monument at Dorchester Heights where bookseller turned soldier Henry Knox dragged the British cannons in winter from Ft. Ticonderoga to force the British out of Boston Harbor. I walked from my friends’ home past a big summer house with a water view where President Bush, Sr. was born and then a block away went inside the Forbes home built with clipper trade ship profits from the Opium Wars era.

Saw RFK, Jr. live online in October 2023 outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia announcing he left the Democrat Party to run for President as an independent.  My parents took me to Philly as a child to see where in that building the US Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were debated and written. For decades a small Betsy Ross flag from her house museum nearby had pride of place on top of my bedroom’s dresser.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. left the Democrat Party in October 2023 after James Roosevelt III and his Democrat political corporation confirmed the month before their new “Party” rules attempting to prevent him campaigning for delegates in New Hampshire.  Last week, he announced he set up at least two new political parties to reduce the number of signatures he needs to get on the November 2024 ballot running as an independent.  The “We the People” party for California and a few other states, the "Texas Independent Party” for use in Texas.

He would have needed 210,000 voter signatures to run as an independent in California.  With a political “party” corporation he needs only 75,000 signatures. The legal window set by the California legislature to collect signatures for his new party has already opened and runs to July 5, 2024.  Those signatures are not for ballot access per se but are signatures to change one’s voting registration to his new political party which can “nominate” anyone it likes to run this November.

Skimming through the requirements to get on the November ballot as an independent for various US states, it seems the easiest may be Louisiana.  No signatures needed from any voters, just $500.  Louisiana with its old French Napoleonic legal code and “parishes” for counties doing things its own way.  “Vive la diference!,” as the French say!  As of January 24, 2024, RFK, Jr. has enough signatures for the November ballots in Utah and New Hampshire.

Like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, I am not a fan of any political party. I try to be friendly and “ecumenical” to all as I am to religious organizations. I’ve always voted as an independent with no party affiliation.  Never given cash to anyone running for office.  I’ve only done sweat equity such as walking two precincts in Palo Alto for a friend who ran successfully for a school board. She ran in November 1997 as a last-minute write-in candidate after the only candidate she supported pulled out of the race after pulling his children out of public schools right before the election. She won every precinct where her volunteers left at voters’ homes paper ephemera and a sharpened yellow pencil with her name on it.

***

Low Attacks on Public Figures

I’ve been reading a lot in recent months what RFK, Jr. has to say about how US state election laws have been rigged to favor the two biggest political parties. How most US mainstream television and newspapers do not cover his presidential campaign. How some online search engines shadow ban searches about him or just lead to webpages saying he is a total wack-job nutter anti-vaxxer.  A lush trust fund dilettante. That his first wife committed suicide after he cheated on her one too many times.  That he’s had serious past substance abuse problems. That the majority of his Kennedy family support President Biden for reelection.

I think of Ben Franklin as a teenager publishing critical words about the Massachusetts royal governor.  Becoming a criminal by leaving an apprentice contract too early. His grandson publishing a newspaper so critical of President John Adams that he was one of the first threatened with imprisonment by Adams’ use of the Sedition Act.   Ben’s “roving” eye during his long years in London and Paris while his one “commn law” wife and many children stayed home in the Americas.  His acknowledged child born out of legal wedlock appointed New Jersey’s royal governor.

In 1998, bones from 28 people plus at least one dog were found in the basement of his #7 Craven Street home in London.  All dated to the timeframe he lived in the house.  Buried evidence of illegal human dissections most likely done by an anatomy school teacher/subletter in Franklin’s basement.  Imagine them and their many science pals working in Franklin’s home basement under the light of candles and perhaps also whale oil lamps when human dissecting work was allowed in England only using the bodies of executed murderers with not enough of those to satisfy the needs of London’s Enlightenment Era scientists with enough cash to pay grave robbers.

Isn’t history entertaining? Thought provoking? Who writes and rewrites it?

***

What is the “true price” of freedom from tyranny?

On Veterans Day November 11, 2021, I went to a medical freedom rally after I laid flowers at the graves overlooking San Francisco International Airport of admirals Nimitz, Spruance, Turner and Lockwood, and their wives. Of those eight, Mrs. Turner died first. They are all buried in one line. Each wife has her own headstone, an extreme rarity in military graveyards. A big statement about those admirals’ marriages!

I’d been playing often in my car a CD of bluegrass musician Paul Williams. Driving up I-280 to the cemetery I punched repeat for his song “Someone Made the Sandals Jesus Wore.” I love the lines about how some can “lead a mighty army into war” while others can “light one little candle in the night” to “make things right.” I’ve never had a chance to lead an army division or navy fleet into battle but I can honor those who did, and wave a flag and applaud anyone today defending human rights like medical freedom.

The admirals did not take their wives to their port base in Pearl Harbor during WW2. They knew most of the personnel of their commands had to leave their families at home so they did, too. They were in WW2 to win it fast and come home. To be able to live in peace with no fears of enemy attacks. Reminds me of George Washington always pining for his home during the American Revolutionary War.

Most know what Nimitz did as the Pacific Fleet Commander and Spruance as the commander at the pivotal Battle of Midway during the Pacific Ocean campaign. Turner was the Navy’s father of amphibious warfare to land Marines and Army soldiers on enemy territory. Lockwood is the submarine officer who helped his fellow submariner Nimitz to replace dud torpedoes a Department of the Navy Washington, D.C.-based big admiral insisted on using for far too many years.

Nimitz spent his final years in the Berkeley hills with a fantastic view of Golden Gate Bridge from his home at 728 Santa Barbara Road.  He never wrote any memoirs.  He chose to let others decide what his legacy would be.  Just like Washington who also never wrote a memoir.

Spruance and Turner retired to Monterey Bay.  Both took up home gardening very seriously. Like Nimitz, they all enjoyed regular brisk walks. Neither wrote a memoir. Lockwood retired to the hills by Los Gatos and served as an advisor on Hollywood submarine movies. 

Halsey, the other most famous US Navy WW2 fighting admiral, died in 1959 on Fisher’s Island off the Connecticut coast, separated from his wife since she was diagnosed with manic depression in the late 1930s, and alone at the island’s club house.  He was plagued during WW2 by psoriasis, an auto-immune skin rash. Perhaps a side effect of an early case of a sexually transmitted disease which trashed his immune system? Just vicious rumors by fellow officers jealous of his promotions?  Or maybe one too many WW1-era US Navy “novel” injections?  He and his wife are buried together at Arlington National Cemetery.

Halsey remains the oldest ever to qualify as a US naval aviator to become one of the first commanders of a US aircraft carrier. After the atomic bombs were dropped and the Japanese signed their surrender documents aboard his flagship, the USS Missouri, when asked how the Allies won he said, “If I had to give credit to the instruments and machines that won us the war in the Pacific, I would rate them in this order: submarines first, radar second, planes third, bulldozers fourth.”

As the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor he was aboard the carrier Enterprise having just delivered Marine pilots and their new Grumman Wildcat fighter planes to Wake Island’s brand new airstrip built with bulldozers. The dozers and a bucket digger had also just north of the airstrip nearly punched through the Wake Atoll to turn its central lagoon into a submarine base after being a Pan Am Clipper seaplane and radio base for a few years thanks to a very secret US Navy construction contract with Pan Am.

Pan Am head Juan Trippe’s brother-in-law, latter the US Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., right after WW2 left federal service to set up Liberia Company, a private for-profit company to handle all Liberian merchant ship flag registrations from an office in Northern Virginia. That company is now called International Registries and based in Reston, Virginia. It handles today all Marshall Islands ship registries. The USA built Liberia’s first deep water port during WW2. Before, during and right after WW2, Japan and USA built many new military facilities including deep water ports in the Marshall Islands. The USA nuked more than one of its atolls during the Cold War. USA granted it sovereignty in 1986 and the UN ended its trusteeship in 1990.

A few days before Halsey launched in early December 1941 Marine fighter planes and pilots 200 miles from Wake Island, a Marine officer Walter L.J. Bayler had arrived on Wake to install its first air to ground radio system which provided a rudimentary direction finding system to detect approaching enemy planes. He was one of the few US military aviators and radiomen with expertise in the then top secret radar. Marines on Wake with the help of civilian contractor construction crews and Pan Am employees fought off Japanese attacks for almost three weeks with those new planes and electronic equipment giving Wake the newspapers’ nickname “The Alamo of the Pacific.” Bayler got out on an amphibious Navy PBY seaplane two days before Wake fell, assigned next to install the first air to ground radio gear at Midway Island along with a radar unit. He then did the same at Guadalcanal. The only US military person who fought on land at Wake, Midway, and Guadalcanal. After he retired from the US military and a Hughes aerospace company, he worked as a high school physics teacher in Orange County, California, one of so many WW2 veterans who migrated to California post-WW2.

***

The Golden Gate

After paying respects at the California admirals’ and their wives’ graves on Veterans’ Day 2021, I drove directly up to the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I planned to hear RFK, Jr. at a rally for medical freedom and then march with him on the eastern sidewalk across the bridge to Marin County.  But, San Francisco police put up fences to prevent the march despite many weeks of the medical freedom folks trying to get a marching permit from San Francisco City Hall.  I felt very sorry for the hapless tourists deprived of a bridge stroll.

I’d walked on the bridge before only once.  In 2008, a public call came for Free Tibet supporters to protest at the bridge before the Beijing 2008 Olympics.  I joined the march at the tail end. We’d all been told in advance the strict march permit rules:  no signs on sticks, no signs bigger than 8” x 11.5”,  no blocking of traffic, and follow all police orders.  We were offered fabric patches with printed “Free Tibet” logos to pin on our clothes.  I had nice chats with the policemen at the tail end where I marched. They marveled how very well behaved and peaceful the marchers were. They said the majority of the assigned police detail had already been relieved of duty well before we finished our march.

So, I expected the same behavior from the medical freedom folks on 11/11/2021. Arrived with a small USA flag tucked in jacket pocket. Small purple paper signs on a stick were being offered saying “NO VAXX PASSPORT” tipped me off there’d be no bridge march. No sticks by marchers! Speeches started.

News helicopters flew over head.  Drones taking videos.  SFPD or California Highway Patrol expanded the bridge sidewalk barriers to include part of a car lane. They parked a big city electric signal truck on the south end of the bridge in the far east northbound vehicle lane.  Rush hour started. After the sun set, a northbound driver clipped the signal truck and bolloxed up traffic for many hours. Local news radio traffic reporters blamed the “protestors” for the traffic gridlock. Few of the reporters explained what the protest was about.

I listened to all the speakers at the plaza on the southern end of the bridge before that traffic accident.  RFK never showed up as the final speaker after organizers said the new and unexpected sidewalk blockages by police made the situation unsafe for him to speak.  Or perhaps just un-photogenic? Brief announcement he might cross the bridge in a bus which never happened. Too many car traffic jams to be able to get to the rally? Most of the audience didn’t seem to care at all he was a no-show. Most like me were there to “do something” if only simply to bear witness to the crazy times trying to make any passers-by pause for thought.

In the speakers’ waiting area was, I think, the smiling Texas Doctor Dr. Stella Immanuel wearing a grey cap who’d spoken on the US Supreme Court steps in Summer 2020 with Dr. Simone Gold about off-the-shelf effective corona virus prophylactics and cures she’d used with her patients…

… and General Flynn.

After the last speech and last announcement, I watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean as the majority of rally goers led by an organizer with a megaphone walked up to the police cyclone fences at the bridge’s eastern sidewalk to wave their big home-made and some pre-printed signs at vehicle drivers and passengers. At least one small group got into a convertible car with big posters and drove across the bridge. I walked away on a different path back to my car in a parking lot by one of the numerous never-fired-in-anger US Army Coastal Artillery gun batteries able to sink a naval ship 20+ miles away. 

***

Gamblers’ Wishful Thinking for Artillery

As soon as one Golden Gate defense battery was built, it was technologically obsolete.  What a great business are any arms races! All are being left to crumble back to nature in what is now a National Park except Fort Point’s batteries built at sea level right under the south tower of the bridge. Fort Baker’s eastern batteries to the north of the Golden Gate: one has crumbled already back to dirt, another is covered in trees, and the third’s iron-reinforced concrete is rusting. Before the rally I’d walked up to several of the batteries on the south side of the Golden Gate. A glorious CAVU day, “Clear Air Vision Unlimited” as aircraft pilots say.

I drove away as the stars blinked on listening to news traffic reports wondering what the rally truly accomplished in the short term. What lasts? What crumbles into dust?

All those batteries on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge were built to protect the entrance to San Francisco Bay, so big that it could “hold all the navies of the world” as the Spanish Army explorers wrote in 1769 who first laid Mexican-European eyes on it.  A bay they named - oh the irony! - for St. Francis of Assisi who threw away his soldier’s weapons and rich merchant family’s wealth in the early 1200’s to found a new mendicant religious order he hoped could reform a corrupt Roman Catholic Church.  He preached to the birds and furry creatures when no one at first wanted to hear what he had to say.  One who did listen to him in his lifetime, Saint Claire of Assisi, is the namesake of my home County of Santa Clara, California.

Another delicious irony! In 1780, shortly after the first Franciscan missions and Spanish Army presidios were founded in San Diego, Monterey/Carmel, and San Francisco, the Spanish King Carlos III requested all his Nueva España subjects to donate one or two pesos to the cause of their neighbors in the 13 American Colonies revolting against British King George III. Thanks to that financial support, their descendants are eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution, both Congressionally chartered benevolent societies founded after the US Civil War to recall and teach the spirit of the USA’s first patriots. DAR and SAR are no longer bastions of mostly only old White Anglo Saxon Protestant families.

I asked an Air Force and CAP friend in 2022 over lunch at Ft. Baker what protects San Francisco Bay today from enemy attack given all the old Bay Area military Army forts, Air Force bases and stations, Nike missile batteries, and Navy ports and air stations closed after the USSR fell.  An Air Force Academy graduate and expert in super high tech logistics and procurement contracting, she said the Pentagon is counting on just electronic warfare and Artificial Intelligence to win any war.  Push-button war. Reminds me of the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon” aired first on February 23, 1967. Two planets whose people sanitized and economized a long war with each other by using computers to do simulated battles and order people to submit to painless executions for battle “losses” to keep the computerized war going. Insane. Letting their “clean” war run endlessly.

***

My Crash Course in Real War

I watched the Vietnam War on television news nearly every evening with my father. He hated the US Defense Department’s policy of sending troops there for one year tours of duty. “D—— ticket punchers who just want combat duty on their resumes for promotion!” How he hated the endless educational draft deferments given to those lucky enough to stay in universities for endless graduate degrees.

He explained to me the USA was not in it to win and come home fast. I recall reading at home the screaming newspaper headlines about the Pentagon Papers exposing the wishful thinking of paper pushing consultants at the Rand corporation in Santa Monica, California. A contractor so very close to the Los Angeles Air Force Base, now a Space Force Base, in a metro area where most WW2 and Cold War aerospace technology federal contracts were and still are negotiated with chop marks by paper pushing staff officers at the Pentagon.

In July 2022, I drove the perimeter of the Los Angeles Space Force Base. Noted the pedestrian walkway from it over a major street to the (wink, nod) “private” Aerospace Corporation created to make it easier to make federally funded secret prototypes for new technology. Counted the major defense and orbital spy tech contractors within walking distance. Which had full and which had empty parking lots. What black budget aerospace advanced technology has each built and still kept secret? Lockheed still won’t or can’t disclose the top speed of its early 1960’s SR-71 spy plane.

Wright brothers experimenting at Kitty Hawk to landing on the Moon is under 70 years. Apollo 11 on the Moon in 1969 to now it’s 50+ years later. Grainy “UFO”photos last year on mainstream news of an object flying at Mach speeds, diving under water and leaping back into the air. Inane scare-porn “aliens” propaganda or reality to scare an “enemy”? A Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster joke? And, what has that unmanned mini-space Shuttle been doing for “USAF” on its long missions? I never forget the USA launched its first Corona spy satellite built by Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California from Vandenberg AFB under the cover story of a NASA “exploration” satellite.

A couple miles away from the old L.A. AFB, I also drove the perimeter of Northrup’s old airport in Hawthorn where Jack Northrup built his first flying wings. A SpaceX facility fills its southern half filling Northrup’s old WW2 factory buildings. The SpaceX company founder’s Boring company machine tunneled underground there a tunnel big enough for cars hoping, he said, to reduce surface highway traffic. Then silence on his tunnels. I can guess who would like a relatively cheap and effective tunneling machine like his relatively cheap reuseable rockets. The SpaceX parking lots were packed.

My Dad and I watched TV news together in April 1975 when the last US military helicopter lifted off the roof of our Saigon embassy. All the USA money spent on a “lost cause” war. All the lives lost. So many lives destroyed. Endless minefields still not cleaned up almost 50 years later. He was incandescent with rage.

August 2021. I watched the news the day the USA flew its last big transport plane away from Kabul. I was numb. Watched the return to Dover Air Force Base of the 13 US military personnel killed defending the airport for that USA evacuation. I could only think of a friend I made in the curling sport world who had organized men and women to curl together for fun on Afghan frozen lakes. He lives in Germany now. I pulled off my home bookshelf a September 1968 National Geographic with photos of smiling men and women socializing in Kabul. Not one young urban woman veiled. What, pray tell, did the USA accomplish there in 41+ years of military, NGO, and “intelligence” agency actions starting when the USSR invaded it in 1979 and USA armed rebels?

To do something positive after the USA’s ignominious bungled exit from Afghanistan, I had a pho dinner in a mom & pop Vietnamese restaurant in Sunnyvale, California which had been a Bob’s Big Boy in my childhood. I’ve gotten fond of Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk. My pho had sliced fresh jalapeño peppers, fresh Thai basil, meats, rice noodles, and fresh bean sprouts floating in a rich broth with generous squirts of fresh lime juice. Asked the owner where I could buy the single cup coffee presses he uses.

Drove to a Vietnamese grocery a few blocks away on El Camino Real behind a Black Bear Restaurant to buy a combination of Asian and French foods. Bought a single serving metal coffee press like the one used at the pho restaurant. Perused the abundant supply of canned condensed milk picking out a purple ube flavored one for use baking a sponge cake. Another made in California with lots of Vietnamese writing on the label. I was the only non-Asian in the store. One of the biggest Vietnamese refugee communities in the USA is in nearby San Jose, California. The biggest USA Afghan refugee community is a few miles away in Fremont, California on the East San Francisco bayshore. Haven’t yet found my local Afghani grocery store.

My Dad and I also watched the February 1973 TV news as the first of our Vietnam POWs returned to nearby Travis Air Force Base where my Dad had returned home in 1960 from Korea via Midway and Wake islands. By then I was old enough to be reading the daily newspapers and weekly news magazines with him. I knew how they were mostly Air Force and Navy pilots. All had been tortured and starved. Dad loathed actress Jane Fonda to the day he died after she laughed sitting on North Vietnam artillery and gave North Vietnam military personnel USA POWs’ written notes about their torture handed to her in secret by handshakes.

I did not know for many decades about the horrors of USA’s use of napalm, ignited phosphorous, nor Agent Orange defoliant used all over Vietnam. Nor that Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, had gone to the WW1 peace talks in Versailles as a migrant working in Paris waving the US Declaration of Independence hoping his homeland could be granted independence after WW1 instead of remaining a French colony. “Indochina” later part of it was named Vietnam. After the USA stopped funding South Vietnam’s military the North Vietnamese rolled in. Then the Chinese invaded but were pushed back. So much for the Domino Theory.

Independence is never free, it must be fought for.

As a grade school student in Summer 1973 I watched alone most of the Watergate hearings run on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, and started to form my own political opinions. First lesson: most full time politicians and high level federal employees are self-centered nudnicks without a concept how the real working world works to produce food, products and services people use in their daily lives. Few of them ever put their own carcasses or their children’s in harm’s way during any wars. They talk. Push paper. Pontificate. Do the minimums, paid generously, have good hair and clean clothes, and rarely get fired.

As an adult after 1997, I got to know a few extraordinary people in Washington, D.C. who always acted as genuine government “servants” doing their work for all The People scrupulously honoring the intent of those who wrote our US Constitution. They each quietly did the work of at least 100 garden variety government employees.

“There are two distinct classes of men - those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.” - Thomas Paine

The target of the Watergate hearings, President Richard Nixon, was a Quaker who served during WW2 as a logistics officer for the US Navy in the South Pacific. He seethed with rage there unable to get a political career combat duty ticket punch being labeled as a pacifist Quaker. When then famous aviator Charles Lindbergh came to his island teaching pilots how to extend their fighter planes’ range with every fighter pilot in fan-boy reverence, Nixon stayed far away from “Lindy” in his free time playing poker desperate to earn as much cash as he could make fur a poltifcal race he;d enter after the war was over and he left the Navy. Seared by the pain of crushing poverty in his youth.

My Dad was a fan of Nixon because they’d both worked hard through college to earn tuition, books, food and lodging money, and an encounter with him. At Brown University while working as a waiter, Dad accidentally dropped a strawberry shortcake on the then US Vice President Nixon. Nixon just brushed off the whipped cream goo from his suit, smiled at my horrified Dad, and when the event was over he left an envelope with a very large cash tip for all the student waiters, including my Dad.

When cameras were off, Nixon could have an angry, vicious, and foul mouth. No sign he ever cheated on his wife, Pat. Rumors he could be an alcoholic sometimes but just rumors. Was he unduly paranoid in his White House years? Did keeping an “enemies” list do him any favors? Why did he think dressing up White House military band members like Robert Preston in the musical “The Music Man” was ever a good idea? Who exactly were the bumbling Watergate “plumbers” who set his political fall in motion? All were CIA or FBI. After 50 years the grand jury which charged the Watergate plumbers and named Nixon as a “co-conspirator” still have never had divulged any evidence it was presented by DoJ prosecutors against Nixon. Just a DoJ prosecutorial “road map” memo with no criminal statutes cited was finally made public just a few years ago. I constantly change my mind about Nixon and his life as new information drips out.

I enjoyed reading the many books he wrote after he left the White House. As he aged I could see in his writings a lot of his old inner anger dissipating. Found peace at the center before the end of his life. The logo for his Presidential Library has an eagle carrying peace branches in both feet, no arrows in one set of talons like the US President’s official seal. Got to give him credit for getting the USA out of Vietnam much quicker than the USA has warred in the Middle East. And, in 1972 one of tghe biggest Electoral College wins in history.

But, I’ve not yet forgiven him for taking the USA “Federal Reserve Note” money off the gold standard in 1971 and not restoring JFK’s “United States” bank notes. In 1971, France demanded under the Bretton Woods Agreement full payment in gold for its US dollars. Gold in amounts the US did not have on hand to back its gold standard dollar. Essentially, France called the bluff of the effectively private 3rd Bank of the US, a.k.a. the US Federal Reserve, which for decades had been running a lucrative Ponzi scheme or gambling bluff after it had recklessly issued way too many Fed dollar banknotes with an enabling Congress running amok with deficit spending (thanks Vietnam War, Apollo Space Program, LBJ’s Great Society and inflation!) while the Fed's member banks had been allowed to issue way too many loans ever since the Fed was established in 1913. Deficit spending means “someone” - guess who? - makes money loaning the USA money in return for interest payments.

Nixon was well aware JFK had been assassinated in 1963 five months after signing Executive Order #11110 which had the US government issue its own currency in 1963 backed by silver stockpiles, the “United States Note,” which quickly out competed the Fed’s bank “notes” which charge interest for each one issued payable to the Fed’s member private banks while JFK’s note didn’t charge interest and thus $4.5 billion of them quickly went into circulation. His notes were all quickly pulled after his assassination and destroyed.

Gee whiz, why was John J. McCloy, President of the Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60) and 2nd head of the World Bank (1947-9) named to the Warren Commission to gum shoe “investigate” JFK’s murder? Along with Allen Dulles whom JFK fired in 1961 as head of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle? And, good old reliable new guy Congressman Gerald Ford, a college footballer Navy ship “recreation” officer in WW2 who replaced Nixon as President in 1974. Congressman Hale Boggs, too, who mysterisly disappeared in Alaska, shortly after he publicly said he never believed uin the Warren Commision’s magic bullet theory. He’s still not been found.

Met Nixon’s daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower once at a party at the Menlo Park home of one of my Mom’s clients, Betty Lohman, after Betty sponsored a lecture by Julie and David at nearby DeAnza Community College. I found them completely charming, smart, and highly ethical. I believe Nixon had a Jekyll & Hyde personality. One at home and on television, another in his office when he let his rages loose.

Wars with guns or political cat fights, and mental wars: who are the true winners and losers?

***

More End of Life Reflections

Fort Baker became an important place for family and reflection for my Dad in his final year of life after most of the Fort was newly turned into a luxury resort with drop dead views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. He was barely ambulatory in his final year with a sudden onset cancer diagnosed after he lost a great deal of weight for his 50th wedding anniversary and to make a planned knee surgeries easier. He loved to sit on a porch of the old officer housing and see the City where he worked for most of my lifetime.

He’d served as a US Army artillery officer from 1959 through the Cuban Missile Crisis when he was called up as a reservist for active duty having been trained in the most sophisticated artillery systems at White Sands near El Paso, Texas. My Mom told me once how terrified she was during those days of the Missile Crisis. It took me years to understand its trigger was JFK sending early intermediate range nuclear missiles to Turkey aimed at the USSR.

Dad served in 1959-60 at the US Army’s artillery forward fire base Camp Barbara on the Korean DMZ. Barbara, the patron saint of artillery men. Artillery, the Queen of Battle, which gives a semblance of “decorum” to what otherwise is an “unmitigated brawl.” He and his men traded occasional live rounds with North Korean soldiers. I think anyone who has served in such live fire conditions facing people willing to use snipers to kill changes your brain forever if you survive. You become ever watchful. Learn how to be a warrior to fight back to live. Some, like my father, also become a sheepdog to protect those who can’t defend themselves. Fearless in the face of danger. Always able to smile or laugh when times are crazy.

He learned to speak Korean, helped a local group of Catholic nuns near the base to obtain clothes for war orphans from his family back in New York, and lived in the house of a South Korean general as an aide-de-camp for his final months in Korea. He often told me the Koreans are the Irish of Asia. Just like the Irish Catholics of his family who survived centuries of invasions by crazy neighbors. Tough people. Smart. Good sense of humor. Two cultures annealed with fire into strong steel.

On long car rides around our Santa Clara County homes he’d always point out to me vulnerable infrastructure such as electrical high power line substations where power is stepped down for use in homes. He paid for many of his college years by building tract houses in summer. He taught me as a small kid how to make concrete, lay bricks, etc. He was always attuned to infrastructure big or small of our modern civilization. Know how each works from his college engineering days and how to fix them by working with his hands. He impressed on me in any emergency, like being an airplane pilot-in-command with a suddenly sputtering engine: Rule One - never panic. Fly the plane! Try Plan A. If that doesn’t work try Plan B, etc.

When I was a teen the PG&E Metcalf electrical power substation south of San José (St. Joseph) had a glitch, an explosion of some kind, causing a big regional blackout. Dad explained to me exactly how easy it is to shut down our civilization in the San Francisco Bay urban area because ever fewer people living here truly know how to survive 3 days without fresh water or electricity. He was of the opinion the outage might have been a deliberate test. Maybe Soviets? “White hats” worried about Soviets or terrorists given the then frequent Palestinian airliner highjackings?

On April 16, 2013 at 1:37 AM, armed attackers caused another outage at that same substation in Coyote Valley by shooting up 17 transformers. 39 minutes beforehand nearby AT&T fiber optic telecom cables were cut. A brief flurry of local news, some Congresscritters spoke in the national news, and then it was mostly all forgotten.

3 days. 72 hours. As a Civil Air Patrol pilot like my Dad, I learned from old search mission reports in the days before cell phones and handheld satellite Personal Locator Beacons how anyone downed in an aircraft needing a USA search mission, even if uninjured after a crash or emergency landing, over 70% will die in 3 days unable to stay alive. Today, modern aircraft emergency beacons, PLBs, and cell phones do not - what a surprise! - eliminate bad luck or stupid human tricks by lost people who seem more reckless to me today in the great outdoors than pre-cell phone days. “I’ll just push this button and the calvary will ride in to save special me!” My Dad taught me as a first grader how to stay alive in any emergency for longer than 3 days when our family flew often on cross country flights in small planes back and forth across the USA. One key is pre-trip planning to avoid needing a rescue. And, knowing how to set 3 emergency fires n a triangle.

On long drives to ski in the Sierra Nevada as a teen and college student with my Dad he’d always point out the mountain passes where he’d flown missing aircraft searches. Donner. Carson. Ebbetts. Kearsarge. Sonora. Dreaded the word “Kearsarge” until I finally flew, hiked, or drove every pass, the last one in October 2022, a dozen years after he died.

On long drives, we’d sometimes scan the horizon to find big infrastructure “targets.” Discuss how to shut down any highly urbanized population cheaply, quickly and without being seen by any people or any electronic sensors. Helping the Civil Air Patrol collect FAA radio and radar data for missing aircraft searches he’d seen USAF SR-71’s on radar scopes flying at Mach 3 to and from Beale Air Force Base just north of Sacramento. He’d seen U-2s on radar when he was in Korea. He’d tell me how their spy cameras and those in orbit by 1970 could see anyone outside “picking their nose.”

We’d do the same driving around the urban area where we lived. I’ve come to know exactly where all the pipelines are above and below ground which bring potable water from the Hetch Hetchy dam just north of Yosemite National Park to San Francisco and to our old family home in Palo Alto. The locations of every City of Palo Alto Utilities Department water storage tank and emergency well. Where the public access sites are for each one. The locations also of Purissima’s and California Water’s company wells, storage tanks, and water mains for the well water used at my current home and office in Los Altos. Working in residential real estate most of that time, reviewing endless property inspection documents and walking land parcel perimeters makes that spotting hobby easy.

On February 17, 2010, on a cloudy/foggy morning a small plane after take off from Palo Alto Airport clipped the high power electrical transmission line running along San Francisco Bay between San José and San Francisco. 3 aboard died. No one on the ground died. Electrical power blackout for 12 hours. I used matches to light my gas stove to make morning coffee. Telephone land lines at home and work worked fine with their small power/communication copper wires. Had plenty of candles and matches if the outage continued too long. Opened my home fridge only twice. Got a lot of home gardening done.

Last winter we had some unusually severe wind storms. For the first time in my life in California we had no power for more than 24 hours. At sunset, I busted out my emergency candles and matches to find out how many I needed to be able to read after dark with the help of a mirror. Already had an outdoor fire pit, plenty of seasoned firewood, with canned and dried food if needed. A gas stove and oven. 3+ gallons of water in a toilet tank if the water mains failed. And, most important I know my neighbors.

Hmm, place your bets how the San Francisco Bay Area might do if ever seriously attacked by guns or bombs by people of bad will. Or, the Big One Earthquake hits? A tsunami over the Santa Cruz Mountain range between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean as the rock record shows.

So well defended in the past by guns, canons, and fog, the Golden Gate has never been attacked in recorded human history. The US Navy seized it from the new nation of Mexico without firing a shot in summer 1846. In 1769, the indigenous people initially welcomed the Spanish Empire’s explorers and settlers with gifts of food. Lots of carefree and docile human sheep in a lotus-land climate with few sheepdogs then and now my Dad would say.

Based on what is going on today off the coast of Yemen with low tech drones being used to try to shut down shipping through the Hormuz Strait and the Suez Canal what if that happed in SF Bay?  In November 2023, I eyeballed two small US Coast Guard surf rescue ships and 2 rubber boats at Ft. Baker’s harbor plus some small National Park Service patrol boats as the first line of defense at the Golden Gate. No more US Department of Defense military crews who used to service an anti-submarine chain there and the coastal batteries. Nearest Navy port is San Diego.

How about town police and county sheriffs? All the local city police departments have had trouble since the Summer of 2020 recruiting new employees but for a few mostly mostly residential-only self-governing communities like Atherton and Woodside where many tech and venture capital titans live and vote for any ballot measure to increase pay and benefits for their police departments.

Nearest military airport with a squadron of fighter jets is NAS Lemoore south of Fresno. The California Air National Guard at Moffett Federal Airfield in Silicon Valley has a small fleet of rescue helicopters and transport planes plus Google’s executive jets. The Coast Guard has aircraft at SFO, some more helicopters with guns. Maybe the US Space Force has something in orbit able to blast an EMP pulse on anything anywhere on Earth, under ground, or underwater. The Pentagon is “counting on electronics and A.I..”

Why do I hear Nimitz, Spruance, Turner, Lockwood, and Halsey - plus all their wives - spinning in their graves?

***

At Calvary Church

I’d only learned about the November 11, 2021 medical freedom Golden Gate Bridge rally and march thanks to getting on an e-mail list from the protestant San José Calvary Church, the one and only church in my County never to shut its doors in 2020-2021.  Its leaders decided to exercise and fight for their US Constitutional rights to Freedom of Assembly and Freedom of Religion.  Rights not voided by any “pandemic” exceptions created by any government authorities.  Calvary was fined $100,000’s by Santa Clara County, has won some court cases, but is still fighting to have the remaining fines voided as of December 2023.

I’d gone to that church to hear a lecture by Dr. Simone Gold earlier in 2021 after she appeared in Summer 2020 on national television news with other “frontline” doctors on the steps of the US Supreme Court to talk about effective off the shelf prophylactic and cure medicines for the pandemic virus.  It was wonderful to sit in a packed room listening to her in 2021 where virtually no one wore a mask, those horrid things full of mold, fungus, bacteria and viruses if worn for too long. The most smiling human faces I’d seen in one place in almost a year and a half.  It made me cry in happiness. A time when my home County still required masks for everyone in public indoor spaces unless - “The $cience!” (trademarked) - while sitting down eating or drinking. She ended up in jail last year for a few months for having spoken about medical freedom outside the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

In 2022, I got an email invite to be part of a photo opportunity for RFK at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park in San Mateo (St. Mathew) County just north of my home.  He was in the middle of a civil lawsuit against Facebook and its holding company Meta after being deplatformed for his critical writings on the novel virus’ experimental injections.  I sat for most of the event with other protestors at a busy intersection as rush hour started with a printed poster I picked up in front of the nearby Jack n’ the Box restaurant. Waved it at drivers, many tooting their horns and waving back. First time in my life I ever picked up a large political picket sign and waved it in public. Several fellow protestors waved the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

I listened to part of a speech by Naomi Wolf of Daily Clout who was starting her work to publish experimental test documents’ data from Pfizer obtained by a Freedom of Information lawsuit by another group of doctors.  Documents Pfizer and the US government wanted kept secret for 50-75 [sic] years.

“Funny!,” the US government kept secret for over 50 years the POW rosters of military personnel and civilians captured in December 1941 at Wake, Guam, and the US embassies and consulates in East Asia. I got to know many of them thanks to my Dad’s retirement project to help them tell their stories. The US government has still not declassified all the documents it has from the Japanese Empire’s POW camp at Mukden, China where scientists did human subject medical experiments on bioweapons. For example, carve open POWs’ chests, pour in weaponized powdered anthrax, and suture them up to see what happens.

All our military and civilian POWs held by the Japanese who came home were told by the FBI they’d be put in Leavenworth prison for life if they ever talked about their experiences as human medical experiments or their torture as slave laborers for Japanese corporate zaibatsus. “A Cold War is on!” and “we” need pronto a rebuilt Japan as an ally! The civilian construction contractors taken POW from US military facilities at Wake, Guam and the Philippines fought for many years to get US taxpayers’ cash compensation for their 3.5 years as slave laborers for Japan via a special bill passed by Congress.

It took decades for our military POWs to get medical veterans disability benefits for bodies trashed by tropical diseases, malnutrition, torture, and starvation. My Dad’s employee Ken Grimes I’d known from my childhood was taken POW as a small boy in Manila. He never forgave the Japanese for the torture and starvation he and his family suffered at the Santo Tomas prison. The nurse of the obstetrician who delivered me was a friend of my Mom’s mother and a US military nurse POW at that prison. Easy for me to grow up deeply empathetic to those who suffer in wars and suspicious of any government leaders who start or prolong them.

Spring 2022 (or 23?) was also around the time another lawsuit showed the main Pfizer contract with the US government for Operation Warp Speed was a US military “prototype” contract which did not need any truly useful or reproducible animal or human medical experiments nor provide any medically effective thing in anyway whatsoever for full payment.  Produce a lethal or permanently sterilizing bioweapon by accident or on purpose for a new serum? A-OK with that prototype contract. An “emergency” is on!!! Their novel genetic splice n’ dice product, a “vaccine” only because the feds changed the definition of that word in 2020, was patented before 2020. Once it got onto the US childhood vaccine schedule by 2022 it earned a get-out-of-jail free pass from a 1986 vaccine law signed by President Reagan. A vat of arsenic could be thrown into a vaccine batch at a factory and essentially no one at the company could be held criminally or financially liable.

“[A] society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither.” -Thomas Jefferson

I listened to a tiny bit of RFK’s Menlo Park 2022 Facebook speech at a strip mall’s micro public park with a few trees and benches with my back to Willow and Bay roads’ rush hour traffic.  The typical late afternoon bayside strong winds had picked up making me give up trying to hold up any large protest picket sign a couple 100 feet away next to the roads with passing commuters, some stopped at the traffic lights. His speech ended and we all walked together across Bay Road or through its underground tunnel, waiting for each pedestrian crossing signal, for the quick photo op by the Facebook/Meta street sign. It daily has a steady stream of tourists taking selfies.  Tanbark chips surrounded the sign to protect the ground and tourists’ shoes. A small plinth with packed sand under the sign. One yellow-vested Facebook security guard stood by it.

Before the photo op, a women stood all alone for a long time with me in the nearly 20 knot wind with a gold and black homemade sign “FREE SPEECH FOR PHYSICIANS.” I didn’t see her talk to anyone. Her face looked shattered but very determined. I wondered if she was a doctor fired for trying to stop the jabs which legally and chemically are genetically designed bioweapons created by mostly US and Chinese scientists.

I walked to within about 10 feet of RFK as he stopped to talk to a reporter and I waited at a crossing signal as the rally crowd approached the company sign. He held himself stiffly. No jacket in the cold wind.  Dry-cleaned and pressed business shirt with a subdued tie.  Shined leather business shoes.  I picked out visually a few extremely discrete bodyguards. No sign of any entourage of flunkies or hangers-on.

He seemed not to relish truly any public attention.  A reluctant public speaker.  He clearly knew he was physically and mentally very charismatic but there were only a very few there interested to be doe-eyed Beatles’ teenage-minded fanatics. I counted maybe a half dozen such starry-eyed “Kennedy glamour fans” among about 125 people there. The majority like me I suspected were there merely to promote medical freedom and send a message to the owners of Facebook but I saw no news about the rally in local mainstream media.

We gathered around the social media company sign which still has the Sun Microsystems logo on the back screened by thick trees and shrubs. The new social media company sign has been for many years just plastic fabric held on with bungee cords. A reminder to the employees that companies are never forever. 

Did you know most of the Facebook server Q&A engineers are hired by “the admiral”  or that many of those engineers come from the US Navy’s nuclear submarine personnel? Maybe some are hired from the Resilience company headquarters near San Diego on Science Park Road off Torrey Pines Road/State Route 21 or the Illumina company nearby off I-805 at Nobel Drive. Both companies between La Jolla and Miramar Air field and the Mormon Temple Utah Senator Romney used to attend when he had a home on the La Jolla shore.

I learned that secret US Navy “admiral” tidbit from a man I’ve known for nearly 40 years, the attorney-father of one of those Facebook engineers. The Q&A guys have “nothing” to do with “content” he said. Is it true that company has at least one big federal contract as an offshoot of the US federal government’s Operation Lockstep originally intended without search warrants subject to normal Due Process to monitor electronically peoples’ human and interests connections, and thus surveil many of their thoughts? To be able fast to censor, shadow ban, and deplatform anyone as requested by its paymasters?

What struck me most about the rally was the combination of people. Santa Cruz hippy-dippy types to people wearing MAGA baseball caps all working together and smiling often. No one wearing a mask. They made me very proud to be an American.

The baylands marshy Sun Microsystems office complex built on landfill was formerly known by those who worked there as “Sun Quentin” in honor of San Quentin prison with its execution chamber in the north Bay Area.  In both places when the tide and winds are low there is the funky smell of the mudflats which smell a lot like most sewage treatment plants. An OK worksite for those who work all day indoors with electronics. A population which usually has a sunlight Vitamin D deficiency and low social skills such as an ability to read body language, especially anyone who was born after home desktop computers hit the market. Spend too much time in front of computer screens instead of interacting in the real world with live humans face-to-face while going through puberty and your mental ability to read body language will be handicapped for life. Wear or see face masks too often while learning to speak creates language learning handicaps.

I offered to send two of the printed posters to a Smithsonian archivist and fellow CAP member acquaintance whom my Dad helped during his PhD work on WW2 POWs. He’d proudly collected “insurrection” posters from Washington, D.C. trash cans on January 7, 2021. He declined to send my offer to his employer.

A few months before the Facebook rally, I watched live online RFK present his November 2021 book at San Jose Calvary Church. A take-down of the federal employee with the biggest paycheck: Dr. Fauci, the double-masked face of the USA’s 2020-22 pandemic response. A big beneficiary of Congress allowing US Patent Office to issue patents for genetic splice & dice patents by the early 1980’s. I could not find the book in any local bookstores in five towns including Stanford University’s huge bookstore so I ordered it for pickup at one in early December 2021. The small independent bookshop owner who sold it to me (a forth printing edition less than a month after book release) treated it like it was covered in schoolyard cooties. Her shop had for sale prominently near her cash register glittering painted glass Christmas ornaments of Dr. Fauci in a white doctor’s coat and Justice Ginsburg in her black court robe and a fancy white collar. I told the owner it was an actual bestseller on Amazon thus she might want to stock it but she just blinked at me flabbergasted.

Anyone who bought the book at the church could have a free professional photo with the author. He now charges $400 or more for such photos at private fundraisers for his US Presidential Campaign. Given he has to pay out of pocket for more bodyguards now he’s a public figure and after what happened to his father and uncle, I don’t blame him for those expensive “selfie” photos.

I watched his smile slowly fade flash after flash. Good timing for a book release in mid-November 2021 right before a Christmas gift giving season! Fun to see in this live feed Mr. Albert Benavides, a member of San Jose Calvary church, a Substack writer and Bitchute blogger as Welcome the Eagle for his CDC VAERS data dashboard website. Albert introduced Los Altos Hills venture capitalist and Substack writer Mr. Steve Kirsch to RFK on the Calvary stage in June (or July?) 2021 right after Steve appeared on Mr. Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse Podcast with Dr. Robert Malone. I watched that podcast a day or so after it came out thanks to a link on Gab.com. Those five men have been working together ever since with a growing number of medical freedom fighters to put sunlight on the lethal side effects of the novel corona virus jabs. After Steve became a national figure I see often a private security car at the end of his home street.

***

Coda 1

After RFK announced in April 2023 he was running for President, in mid-June 29023 he asked supporters to march for him in July 4 parades. I went to his brand new campaign website.  Found my nearest group marching for him in Aptos on Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) County.  I snapped photos of the marchers under the town’s thick redwoods lining most of the parade route. Loved seeing one man march as an American Revolution soldier, perhaps a member of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution organization. The campaign had put out a call for parade photos to illustrate a video for the Woody Guthrie song with the words “From the redwood forests to the Gulf stream waters…”    I learned that song in kindergarten class.

Walked to the public park where the parade ended. Found out the Kennedy local march organizers had to pay well over $100 to buy an official Kennedy campaign march banner to be listed on his campaign website.  But, most of their signage was homemade. They gave me a campaign button.  I have yet to wear it anywhere.  Something sticks in my craw about the “Jr.” in his name. I simply don’t like any political dynasties.  I am suspicious.  But I wish him well in his race.  He did not choose who his parents are. Curious whom he will pick to be his Vice President running mate. Still have no idea whom I might vote for in November 2024.  The year is young! 

I want to see a true Lincoln-Douglas style debate series by the leading candidates this summer and autumn. Only debaters and timers with no moderators. Not just “for old time’s sake” because my 3x great grandfather John Hossack was in the audience of the first of those debates at the grassy town square of Ottawa, Illinois!  I want to see all the toughest political questions of our time debated openly and fiercely. Articulately and politely. No endless boring streams of words on tele-prompters or from inserted ear aids with words from assistants and consultants, all pre-vetted by focus groups for a pre-scripted show.

***

Coda 2

Picked up last week two books at Feldman’s Used Books in Menlo Park about Franklin’s life. “The Devious Dr. Franklin” about his 15 years in London leading up to his signing the US Declaration of Independence. “Franklin & Bache” for his years in Paris during the US Revolution before he came home to work on the US Constitution, and his and his grandson’s work as newspaper publishers.  Ruminating on how he chose to live his life, how and why he did what he did in business, science, and politics; and to recall what he expected about the future of the USA in exactly our own times gives me a great deal of hope for 2024.  “Been there, done that” crystal clear lessons learned from 250 years ago.  It is up to us, “We the People” as RFK, Jr. named his brand new California, Mississippi, North Carolina,  Delaware, and Hawaii political party(s) to fight to retain and strengthen our “God-given” inalienable rights enshrined in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Use them and defend them, or lose them!

(copyright reserved by AJ for photos and text)