He "fought back" with a Lemon Garden
and other wacky power games and pastimes in hot summers as Bastille Day approaches
Sunday, July 23, 2023 (updated Wednesday, July 10, 2024)
Home lemon harvest July 10, 2024
I’ve been sitting for decades on a book’s quote about a French king fighting a priest who was one of his closest advisors and ministers. One of many battles between them involved their home gardens. One man built a grand palace with an orange garden. The other "fought back" with a new palace with a lemon garden. Their potted citrus trees were always manicured, every tree the same height, and all set out like soldiers standing at attention in rows ready to take orders or be admired. A fruit battle of ridiculously childish and petty smoke & mirrors, a hissy cat fight over social and financial status in thgar days such citrus in northern France was a rarity when the real battle underneath the two autocrats was who controlled the collection and spending of not just the French tax revenues and church plate collections but deciding who were the lead creditors for the King’s and government’s loans, what interest payments were made to whom and when, and who got what loan kick-backs. And, who in those days of bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants confiscated whose properties and gave them to whom. Who in their aristocratic day literally doffed their caps and bowed to whom.
Chateau de Richelieu (from Wikipedia)
One of the combatants was Cardinal Richelieu (1585 - 1642). Does it really matter in the year 2023 if he r his King-adversary had which fruit garden and who “won” in the long run? I can never remember if the Cardinal had lemon or orange trees. Who owns which of their many palaces which survive today? Whose garden or deeply held personal values survived if any? Who truly controlled the French government’s purse in their day? Running constant budget deficits it wasn’t truly the King or Cardinal in power.
I think of the bigger than life size portraits of the two men. The Cardinal in his super expensive red silk moire flowing robes as a Prince of the Roman Catholic Church. King Louis XIII (1601 - 1643) in his equally expensive royal blue silk velvet robes or his penchant for being remembered as an Action Man in masculine dark black armor. Both dripping in gold jewelry, extremely costly fabrics, and other embellishments in all of their portraits. Spent their entire adult lives looking over their shoulders for assassins or those who would happily take their powers and riches away by force, poison, blackmail, flattery and lies. Ever shifting alliances with mortal enemies for daily survival.
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In my email inbox on 7/23/2023, up popped a copy of Paul Delaroche’s “Saint Vincent de Paul Preaching to the Court of Louis XIII on Behalf of the Abandoned Children.” It accompanied an essay by a lawyer detailing the latest on the bat flu injection litigation such as the case thrown out of one U.S. court after Pfizer, a big jab maker, successfully argued its products were mere “prototypes” made and distributed under U.S. military prototype contract(s) thus not subject to any normal commercial mass market human testing or side effects monitoring laws. The essay writer’s nom de plume is an the old English word for the lands under the control of a local bailiff or sheriff: a bailiwick.
Saint Vincent de Paul. I had no idea he lived in France during that French King and Cardinal’s fruit fight. To me his name was simply that of a charity in Redwood City, California where I’ve been once to drop off artwork and other quality things cleared out of my parents’ home after their deaths. My Mother’s friend G. F.’s mother went every week with one of her friends to that Redwood City charity to do work with their own hands, most often at the daily feeding programs for the local poor.
My Dad, a Catholic, always told me after his experience serving in the US Army in South Korea, that the best run charities truly helping the most people, that is with the lowest staffers’ pay and administration overhead, was that same charity and even better the Salvation Army in Korean cities or an order of Catholic mendicant nuns located next door to his artillery firebase on the DMZ. He volunteered with those nuns in his free time to help take care of war orphans. He had his oldest sister in New York mail him frequent boxes of good quality used clothes to give those orphans.
Mrs. F. and her close friend Louise M. Davies without any fanfare or bragging did what they considered their Christian duty at St. Vincent’s to those less fortunate than themselves. They lived near each other in the foothills above Redwood City, both near the home of the retired actress Shirley Temple Black. The three ladies' children grew up together. My Mom’s friend G. learned how to swim in Louise’s pool taught by Mrs. Black, at one of the few pools in the neighborhood. The kids roamed all over the foothills together on horses.
G. was a bit wild in his youth. Got kicked out of more than one school. He ended up doing very well in life with a great marriage, great kids, and great career. His mother and Louise helped fund a group of Central European Catholic mendicant Benedictine monks escaping Communism who set up the Woodside Priory prep school for boys located in the small town of Portola Valley sitting in the foothills above Stanford University. The San Francisco diocese was not happy with the idea of that school fearing it would soak up too much of its nearby neighborhoods’ rich Catholics’ cash. So, the diocese requires to this day the mendicant order of monks never to advertise their chapel as open to the public as a condition of being allowed to set up a school run by that order within the geographic territory controlled by the diocese.
Petty, no? Many San Francisco diocese churches today are bleeding parishioner numbers. Its St. Patrick Seminary to educate new diocese priests in Menlo Park has had to sell more than 50% of its land to pay for sex abuse lawsuit settlements and fund the retirements of its diocese priests who came of age before the Baby Boom ended in 1964 when the birth control pill became legal in the USA for all women. Its parishes had been stuffed with church goers with lots of kids with new churches popping up all around the San Francisco Bay Area until the 1970's when public elementary schools started to close for lack of enough new children. The Priory school thrives today. It became co-ed to survive the end of the Baby Boomer birth wave, has a long waiting list, and a strong culture of taking in qualified charity students.
A few years ago, the St. Patrick’s seminary top priests’ mansion had a rummage sale to fund needed building repairs. I walked all over the two story old home. It seemed last to have been redecorated inside during the 1960’s or early 1970’s. A small private chapel on the second floor had a bright red low-pile stained wall-to-wall carpet and stained glass windows reminding me of the private chapels I’d seen in European palaces and mansions where potentates need not go to a church open to the populace except on rare see-and-be-seen occasions. The chapel was very dusty. It felt fake and unused like a cheap and soulless carnival ride in the off-season. In Fall 2023 that mansion became part of a brand new Catholic prep school named for the author and late life Catholic convert C.K. Chesterton.
One of the disgraced San Francisco retired cardinals, a short and thin balding man, was at the rummage sale in civilian clothes looking for rich people to button hole. He scanned me briefly and wordlessly from the top of my head to my toes and then his eyes moved on to others as he reconnoitered the buying crowd. Old Victorian and Edwardian Era “Punch” magazine cartoons of famous British men were framed and lining the main staircase, just like the British Queen Mum’s collection at her old home’s staircase at Birkhall house near Balmoral Palace. I wondered who donated those exact same framed Big Men cartoons to the local retired diocese bishops and cardinals, or if one collected them himself on travels to the British Isles using his salary or pension to pay for them. I seriously considered buying one of a man I admire but it was far out of my price comfort level.
In a bedroom on the second floor a tall old wooden finial from a massive armoire was loose and had fallen on top of the big piece of furniture. I thought it would make a great “dolly” target for outdoor curling. I asked to buy it and was refused by a saleslady who said it could not be sold separately from the armoire. Minutes before the day’s sale closed I asked her again if I could buy it. “Yes! $15.” I had Mr. Morrison, a local fine woodwork restorer, add lead weights to the base and I’ve used it on ice in outdoor curling games.
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Louise’s husband Ralph expected one day to be named a next CEO at Standard Oil before WW2 started but he never got that job. Maybe because his family was Catholic? Standard Oil was founded by John Rockefeller who was raised by his Baptist tea-totaller Mother and a con-artiste father who made his living as a traveling salesman flacking dubious snake oil and “patent” medicines. Why the oilman monopolist had alopecia early in life I suspect was due to use of or exposure to one too many of his Father’s special potions or just his life-long hyper stress levels which could crash anyone’s immune system.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave Ralph a better job after WW2 broke out. FDR had often gone quietly during the Great Depression for fishing vacations to the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston Bay and to nearby private San Jose and Matagorda islands to talk to their owners, in their day among the 5 richest men in the USA. On Wednesday December 10, 1941 according to one of them, independant Texas oilman Sid Richardson, the White House called to ask him to have lunch in Washington, D.C. with FDR in four days on Sunday. Sid’s nephew and main heir Sid Bass recalled, “The President’s message, in essence, was, ‘Sid, I want you to have lunch with me next Sunday and tell me what shape we are in for petroleum. I don’t trust those major company bastards.’” The day after their lunch in D.C., the USA declared war on Germany.
http://res.dallasnews.com/interactives/oilkings/part2/
Shortly after the US declared war on Germany, FDR asked Ralph to run a quasi-governmental oil consortium as a federal employee “dollar a year man” to ensure the US military had every petroleum product needed anywhere for the war effort, in return for, officially, a 10% profit to the oil companies. Ralph was highly respected in the oil business for his ethics and salesmanship, probably recommended by Sid Richardson to FDR to be the USA’s WW2 oil tsar.
Thanks to Ralph’s work there were never any gas or oil shortages in the USA during WW2. Petroleum product rationing for USA civilians was all a fraud, an FDR Administration propaganda spin to make the “home front” feel part of the “war effort.” The old “We’re all in this together!” psy-op on people who never needed to give up their recreational travel in private cars, train carriages, or planes during the war. No need for the petroleum product ration cared forced on the masses.
I’ve a friend who as a kid lived near Yuma, Arizona during WW2. He often saw FDR during winters getting off a train to motor to his USS Potomac massive pleasure yacht to pass the time in the Sea of Cortez. Total press censorship blackouts on that very costly presidential pleasure movement. The Potomac was US Coast Guard cutter built in 1934 now on display as a tourist attraction at the Port of Oakland in California. I’ve been aboard. It’s star feature is a massive handicapped-accessible steel bathtub.
Eleanor Roosevelt was rarely aboard the Potomac
Most Americans today know FDR as the face on the US dime and as the “savior” of the Great Depression. A champion of the average working man. Most give him a 100% pass on his many longtime mistresses, dying in the arms of one. Another pass on his making the Depression worse by his 1933 financial “experiments” from closing all U.S. banks, picking in a dark closet favorite “good” banks to reopen a week later after good and bad loans were “repackaged,” and then months later deliberately crashing the US dollar by taking it off the gold standard in dribs and drabs illegal moves papered over by a go-along Congress, and then trying to pack the US Supreme Court with his rubber stamps to destroy the US Constitution’s careful balance of government powers designed to protect individual and states rights, which in the end all benefitted…
His grandson James Roosevelt the Third is a longtime member of the rules committee for the Democrat National Committee, Incorporated. In September 2023, he voted to keep all challengers against President Biden in the wilderness starting with no primary debates allowed. He also voted to punish New Hampshire for daring to keep its “retail” politics press-the-literal-flesh primary “first in the nation” such that any candidate who campaigned there (where Biden faired poorly in 2021) would have no delegates at the DNC August 2024 convention in Chicago. The upshot of that is Robert Kennedy, Jr, and a few others dared to campaign there in September 2023 and RFK ended up leaving the DNC in October 2023 to campaign as an independent. He was profoundly upset as he explained in a public speech outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the DNC’s trampling of States’ Rights to try to anoint behind closed door with holy/royal oils a presidential party candidate instead of subjecting all its candidates to the populace’s inspection and decisions. Boss Politics 101 that Roosevelt heir learned at home and at places like yachts, private clubs, and houses down long winding driveways far out of sight of the free press.
Now, the DNC is scrambling as it falls apart with different bosses trying to retain or remove the name of their man in the White House after he clearly was seen in the June 2024 debate to have dementia. As comedian and news columnist Will Rogers said in the 1920s or 30s, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” The same could be said of the Republicans today. Each a lump of ruthless and overwhelmingly unethical and immoral fighters maneuvering to stay in power exactly like Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII.
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I find it interesting to see where some powerful people choose to spend their private time and money. After Ralph Davies died, Louise funded the construction of a new symphonic hall in San Francisco across the street from the City Hall. She got to see it before she died. It carries her name on its facade.
6/25/2024 with Karl the Fog.
6/25/2024 at San Francisco’s City Hall, one of many nationwide rallies to urge CNN to let RFK into the Biden/Trump June 27 debate. The Federal Elections Commission had already ruled CNN was not following its federally approved debate procedures thus CNN could be accused of illegal campaign contributions of valuable broadcast airtime to the RNC and DNC corporations by excluding Kennedy. He livestreamed on X (Twitter) and Rumble answers to all the CNN debate moderator questions as the CNN debate was aired. No public audience or any press were allowed inside the CNN debate venue. Kennedy had a live audience at his Los Angeles debate venue. Reports vary on the CNN time lag for its broadcast from 1 minute to 7 minutes. News reports indicated both Biden and Trump refused to debate each other if Kennedy was invited to join them. Kennedy is polling on average at least 15% of the national vote under many of polls the CNN debate rules required for participation.
About 2014, I walked all around Ralph and Louise’s Woodside home while showing it to a well qualified real estate client. For sale at $14M. A tough white elephant listing because of bad road noise from I-280 and an expanded Woodside Road, both built after 1960.
They’d originally planned to build a Tudor Revival style house until two young architects borrowed $50 each from their bosses to convince Ralph to give them a half hour of his time to hear a pitch for a different design. At that time Ralph was the lead vice president of Stanford Oil of California and considered a marketing genius by his bosses.
https://www.eichlernetwork.com/article/eichler-architect-bob-anshen-self-made-man?page=0,1
Bob Anshen and Steve Allen suggested a modern house with nods to a Tudor style and Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house elements. They got the contract, their first job ever as lead architects. The knoll top house was completed on November 30, 1941. From the curving driveway the 6,200 square foot house appears modest. A compressed and understated entrance opens to a soaring foyer and a living room with tall windows on three sides. When built, that room had killer views towards downtown San Francisco and San Francisco Bay before the surrounding chaparral foothills became covered with new houses and newly planted trees now obscuring much of those views. The view to the west towards the Santa Cruz Mountains is still mostly unobscured giving a king's feeling of owning “all the land one surveys.” A flat lawn outside the living room windows was lined with specimen old oaks and flowering shrubs perfect for big outdoor parties.
The dining room had on three sides a subtle and beautiful fresco in earth tones depicting the childhood Sierra Nevada foothills ranch where Louise grew up. Soft rolling chaparral hills dotted with massive oaks. Cattle and horses. Anshen & Allen designed a coordinating horse stable and a pool house, both when I last saw them were falling down from neglect.
Off the living room was a den/library with a massive modern fireplace. A ceiling of seemingly random chunky cubes and rectangles all gold leafed, burnished matte to a subtle shine. A glass door to the driveway perfect for Ralph to have private business meetings without disturbing his family. Pathways outside that door lead down the hill to the tennis court, pool and stables. Most all such big old houses in the Silicon Valley foothills have similar Father-of-the-Family home offices. Some have a small patio outside for cigar smoking.
A kitchen with a circa late 1990’s style incomplete remodel with dark stained wood and dark green marble counters (such a bad choice of a very porous material for working kitchen counters!) with super shiny black sinks and appliances. Nouveau Riche drek by a young-ish non-Davies family’s buyer who ended up bankrupt. Above the kitchen was a wing of mostly small staff rooms, one still occupied in 2014 by a longtime Davies’ family gardener.
Upstairs I walked into the marital bedroom. Everything painted white to focus the eye on the views from the big plate glass windows which in their day would have been insanely expensive. Big closets. An alcove with a chair and built-in table for Louise to fix her hair and makeup. A big mirror to pluck her chin hairs after menopause which most all ladies if they live long enough have the “pleasure” of doing. As a small kid I wondered why there were always those mirror, small table, and chair set-ups in the master suite at big houses. Now, being three score years old I know!
Through another door to a single bed in a very small room right next to the master bedroom. A door to a small balcony with sunset views. Unpainted warm woodwork inside. Very masculine. Did Ralph snore? Did he like to smoke and maybe Louise did not like that in the main bedroom? I sniffed the air and there was a strong whiff of tobacco smell wafting from the woodwork. A cozy spot for super private international telephone calls at odd hours? I thought of him being mentally utterly crushed after not getting the Standard Oil presidential job for which he’d worked for so well for so long.
Ralph and Louise were in the San Francisco newspapers in June 2023. Their grandson Richard Stockton Rush III died trying to view the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible built by a company he founded. People who inherit lots of money instead of earning it all themselves often have “interesting” lives and frequently magical thinking as M,r rush did ignoring the advice of many well experienced deep sea submersible experts.
King Louis XIII’s last eponymous direct heir had his head cut off after the “mob” stormed the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789 after he’d bankrupted France, tge cuyp ge grace funding tge US Revolution to try to bruise his old geopolitical and religious adversary Great Britain. The mob was heavily encouraged by many middle and upper class reformers, such as the King’s cousin the Duc d’Orlean, all trying to get rid of or reform the hopelessly corrupt autocratic monarchy and its state religion apparatus. I like to celebrate July 14, Bastille Day, just 10 days after the USA’s July 4 celebration of our Declaration of Independence against the British Empire then run by King George III. Bad juju all those 3s in their names.
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I learned Saint Vincent de Paul (1581 - 1660) came from a modest French farming family. Like Ralph who started work at age 15 as an office boy, Vincent worked as a child shepherd for his family’s livestock. His father sold the family’s oxen to pay for his first advanced schooling. One story says as a very young priest he worked as a chaplain for galley slaves. Another story says after he became a priest he was captured by North African Barbary pirates and enslaved for two years working for a fisherman and then a doctor. Got back to France and hired as a young priest to serve as a family chaplain and a tutor to the children of the Count of Gondi from a major old Florentine banking family. It was the Countess of Gondi who financed the start of de Paul’s newly created mendicant order of monks to serve the poor.
Today, the Paris home where Vincent de Paul served the Gondi family has its ornamental orchards and gardens long gone. Its street name has been Frenchified to Condé. I wonder if the street nearby called the Quai de Conti on the south side of the Seine River across from Notre Dame where my Mom first visited a Parisian home in 1954 with lunch in its shady ivy filled garden had at one time a Gondi home or business. The home’s owner, Madame J, a family friend, always wore scarves or shawls around her shoulders after being tortured by Nazis for working a spy and courier for the Allies. One of her shoulders was destroyed and deformed by the torture. Some fight for human rights while others are experts at putting their fingers into the wind and following whatever are the strongest winds at the moment.
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I went to my backyard’s garden to check on my citrus trees. A sad potted lemon purchased by my Mom’s business more than 15 years ago to stage for sale a Palo Alto house's back porch finally was planted in the ground two winters ago. It burst to life with new soil, more sunlight, and more space to grow. Its branches almost grew this Spring to 9 feet high tripling its best ever potted height producing lots of lemons and sweet smelling blossoms. So many lemons I’m giving them away to neighbors and friends. No scurvy for us! Maybe next winter I’ll plant a mandarin orange tree like the two I helped my Dad plant at our home when I was in nursery school.
A Mexican lime also was planted in my backyard in 2022 after I purchased it as a one gallon plant from a local nursery. It’s doing OK after nearly being blown to shreds in 2022-23 winter wind storms. I transplanted it this past winter to a spot better sheltered from wind. I’ve only gotten 3 limes off it so far. I let them ripen to pale yellow before picking to maximize their sweetness. Sad to say, USA law requires limes be sold in stores only if still green here. Nuts to that law!
Imagined King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu making their gardeners move their potted citrus trees indoors for every northern France winter. What would they have paid to have one flight in an airplane during their lifetimes? To be able to travel anywhere on the planet in less than a day to chase good weather? Imagined the French Presidents of today at Fort of Brégançon, their private State-owned vacation castle on the South coast of France, with access to fleets of helicopters and executive jets. National French government staff offices are today in the old Duc d’Orlean’s Palais Royale in Paris and in other formerly royal buildings with restored old gilded interiors with modern plastic chairs and glass desk tops. Kings and their courtiers… Chasing what? Accomplishing what?
Fort of Brégançon
Fort of Brégançon is next door to a vacation castle of a ruling autocratic royal family. Sarrazin Tower is owned by the Grand Dukes of Luxembourg. It has extraterritorial status from the Mediterranean Sea to the nearest public road making the property the landlocked grand duchy’s only coastline.
Sarrazin. I once had a small European bank account with that name to hold a Euro bond asset, a childhood gift from a grandfather. That asset started worth under US$4k at Rabobank in the Netherlands denominated in Dutch guilders in the early 1970s. Then it became denominated in the brand new “Euro” when it was only a digital currency at first used only for transactions between banks. Then, the position was automatically moved to Switzerland with a bank name change to Sarrazin at some point. One day I got a letter informing me because my position was “too small” I had to close the account after the USA had changed some of its treaty and banking laws which effectively limited some Swiss banking privacy laws for USA citizens. Bizarre, I thought, because I’d always been scrupulously accurate to report any sales of that asset to the IRS.
Thinking of the Sarrazin vacationers sitting at long winter meals at super private coastal home under citrus trees with the French president neighbors as guests reminded me of a US presidential debate in 2016 between Trump and Hillary Clinton. She accused him of not paying his “fair” share of taxes. He said of course he doesn’t pay those because “you and your friends” rigged tax laws to favor yourselves. Comedian Dave Chappell joked when he heard that, “D——!,” he said. He then seriously said that debate exchange made him vote for Trump for admitting the truth about the tax game. Or, as comedian George Carlin said, “They are in a club and you ain’t in it.”
Funny how there were no USA negative propaganda stories about Luxembourg after 25 “influential” USA newspapers were purchased in 1915 by J.P. Morgan bank which held for its investors the most stock positions for major USA steel, gunpowder, chemicals, and many other big conglomerates. His newspapers began by 1915 to spin constant stories about the Evil Huns who were “raping” and “starving” in WW1 conquered Belgium since August 1914 right next door to conveniently neutral Luxembourg as USA investors were funding both sides of that war. The sinking of the Luisitania was a big reason for the USA to get into WW1 in 1917. And the US/UK gvernmnents’ psy-op Zimmerman telegram. Those 25 newspapers had refused to print ads paid for by Germany warning passengers not to travel on that ship because it was known to be carrying USA-made ammunition to Britain. See in the US Congressional Record the pathetic details of that buy-the-press saga to coerce USA citizens into WW1 in 1917 because Britain and France had no more liquidity or collateral by the end of 1916 for any more war loans from banks. (See 64th U.S. Congress, Congressional Record Vol 54, Part 3 (Jan 27, 1917 - Feb 12, 1917), pages 2933-2975.) Guess whose bank accounts were richer and whose were poorer at the end of that war on November 11, 1918 when Luxembourg stayed neutral as it also did in WW2.
Most French presidents entertain their coastal royal family neighbors when both are using their Mediterranean view homes. Both homes are in a warm microclimate with citrus plants growing year round in the ground. The Luxembourg royal dukes’ home has a stretch of coastline which is all legally Luxembourg territory. Perhaps that was a secret price for some WW1 or WW2 loan forgiveness or debt renegotiation to the nation of France?
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Thought of some of the world’s potentates of today spending another Northern Hemisphere summer chasing cool mountain or sea air winging around on jets or sailing over clear blue waters on private boats. “See and be seen” here and there with fellow potentates at some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Be “top out of sight” down curving roads to private houses with close friends and family, or meeting special people far away from paparazzi packs and news reporters.
A former USA President found himself and his family photographed at an Aegean Sea island’s beachfront restaurant days before July 4, 2023 after stepping off a glamorous ocean going yacht which had come from a port on a smaller island to the east where their restaurant and yacht hosts, actor Tom Hanks and his actress wife Rita Wilson, spend time at their private Greek villa. Did that former President spend July 4 at his Martha’s Vineyard beachfront home? His Hawaiian, Washington, D.C., or Chicago houses? Perhaps he’ll attend the mid-August Illumination Night at Oak Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard, a highlight of that island’s summer season. Or see it from a yacht cruising offshore?
I thought of President Herbert Hoover spending many summer days and nights at his single story mini-White House on top of a hill on the grounds of the Bohemian Grove in its cool California redwood forest. I drove slowly by that house once during a Bohemian Club Family Day. It seemed so sad and lonely all by itself far away from the Hillbilly, Bella Union and other “camps” at the Grove. He, raised to be a pacifist Quaker, got his start in big politics during WW1 leading a “relief” program for Belgium using a massive public relations campaign to gather cash and food donations from the then neutral USA while being a semi-retired “investor” based in London after making a killing as a mining engineer for gold in China and Australia. At the same time two tippy-top J.P. Morgan bank executives were leading American Red Cross relief efforts for “poor” Belgium and recruiting Red Cross nurses and ambulance drivers just to benefit the “Allies” of the British Empire’s “Commonwealth” and France. Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway were volunteer American Red Cross ambulance drivers in France.
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After leaving the White House as a one-term president, Hoover lived most of the time in a New York City Waldorf Astoria hotel apartment after his wife Lou passed away. He gave their pueblo style hilltop home on the Stanford campus for use by the university's president. He visited sometimes his brother’s ranch on the Santa Cruz County coast of California, a ranch now mostly all a State Park. Frequent fly fishing trips near his childhood home in Oregon or deep sea fishing off Catalina Island were his favorite vacations. I wonder if he ever had any true peace at the center after he lost the 1932 election to FDR.
July 23, 2023, Stanford announced its President Marc Tessier-Lavigne was resigning after a year long review board determined he had committed “research misconduct” with too many of his scientific papers. I'd say “gross recklessness” or “scientific fraud” because many of his published lab results could not all be reproduced in labs and many fellow biologists nearly ripped their hair out trying to reproduce his results. Maybe he just let lowly lab assistants or incompetent postdocs produce the lab results that were so dramatic and career enhancing to the ex-Stanford president who never bothered to check their lab work before putting his own name on “his” published papers above his assistants’ names. Reminded me of Wallace Carothers of Dupont, Incorporated (started by French gunpowder markers) taking credit for his assistants' polymer chemical work in the 1920s-30s and then committing suicide when found out.
On Friday, July 21, 2023, the Stanford Law School Dean announced her Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Associate Dean Terien Steinbach who shouted down a federal judge invited to give a talk on March 9, 2023, was also leaving campus. Classic bury-bad-news on a Friday during the slow news time of the late July and early August academic vacation season when so many local people are away on summer holidays. A Saturday Night Live comedy skit with a big “Nevermind!!!” from news commentator character the comedian Roseanne Roseannadanna.
What did George Washington do for vacations? He only left the land of the USA once for a couple of months in Fall 1751 at age 19 to accompany his older half-brother who was sick with tuberculosis seeking warmth on the Caribbean sugar island of Barbados. Until that trip he’d never been more than 200 miles away from his Virginia homes. George ended up in bed on Barbados with smallpox. Once he inherited his Mount Vernon plantation, thanks to his half-brother's early death, he always seemed to pine to be there when his work as a soldier or as U.S. President took him away from it. He loved best long meals with friends at his own home. An ur-homebody who was always focused on how to improve his plantation's soil depleted by mono-cropping tobacco for far too long and thus, how to make his land profitable longterm without use one day of any slave labor by always experimenting with new plants, building a flour mill, distilling whiskey --- anything to turn a profit. He walked away from a shoe-in third term as US President. When Britain's George III heard that he said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
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What “floats your boat” for this summer? I sit today in the afternoon shade under a Cedar of Lebanon tree planted more than 90 years ago, many thanks to I know not whom. Eyeball my garden’s perennial herbs I planted two years ago going gangbusters. Sage. Rosemary. Yerba Buena mint. Epazote challenging some Dusty Miller flowers for height. Self-seeded pink Cosmos and orange nasturtiums from last year. Gifts of young fig plants from my gardener this year. An oak acorn I sprouted in a pot 3 years ago is doing well with leaves almost up to my waist. A squash flower was tasted by an animal, I hope not a gopher. A flowering vine of Passion flowers is setting fruit. A Kiwi vine is still flowerless and fruitless but now almost at roof level. I pick strawberries to eat. My yard’s hummingbird flies by my head within inches as a squirrel in the cedar eyes the ripening passion fruit. Bees buzz. Songbirds sing. I add fresh water to a birdbath. Bird families depended on this land before I arrived and their descendants will be here long after I am gone.
I walk a block to see one of the few un-concreted creeks running through Silicon Valley with big oaks, laurels, willows and buckeyes lining its banks. Oceangoing Steelhead salmon used to run up that creek every year to spawn until downstream cities wanted more land for housing and commercial buildings safe from river flooding in the 1950s by concreting their creek beds. Now, robot cars whiz daily by the creek, passengers inside with eyes glued on computer screens and ears stuffed with electronic hearing aides snuffing out all sounds of nature. Most living here voluntarily inside information silos. I imagine Cardinal Richelieu and his King standing at a footpath by that road and creek slack jawed in wonder at cars moving faster than 25 mph. Their eyes would pop at all the 21st Century joggers’ exposed leg and arm flesh and think most everyone is a madman in their underwear.
”Il faut cultivar notre jardín,” advised Voltaire. It is necessary to cultivate your own garden. A garden of life of all kinds. Not the fake or fraud gardens.