Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
— T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

Theirs was the Age of Myth; a world where the night was not dimmed by our world wide web of lights that now obscures the stars. Their nights were lit by flaring torches, dim oil lamps, guttering candles; by the phases of the moon and the broad shimmering river of the Milky Way. As the sun declined and night ascended, life withdrew into shuttered and barred homes. Only the very rich or the very poor were abroad in the dark.

The night sky, now so thin and distant, so seldom really seen by us, was to them as thick and close as a slab of coal studded with buckshot diamonds. They could turn it in their mind’s eye even as it turned above them. They reclined on their hillsides, their roofs, or in rooms built for viewing and marking the moon and the stars. They watched it all revolve above them and sang the centuries down. They remembered. They kept records and told tales. They saw beings in the heavens — gods and animals, giants and insects, all sparking the origins of myth — and they knew that in some way all was connected to all; as above, so below, “on Earth as it is in Heaven”. They studied the patterns of Creation and from those repeating patterns fashioned our first science, astrology.

And, like all our other celebrated sciences since, they looked to astrology to give them hints about the future, about what they should do, what they should expect, what they should become. They looked to their science then, as many look to Science now, to remove their doubt.

In time stronger, more intricately argued sciences would rise upon the structures of the proto-sciences of astrology and alchemy; sciences that chained demons with data. These new data-based sciences would push those first sciences into the realm of myth, speculation, superstition, and popular fantasy. And, as it is with our advertising, promise, big promise, is the soul of our brave new sciences.

The new sciences, you see, are much, much more about “Reality” than the old sciences. Surely they will never be tossed aside like so many playthings of mankind’s youth. The authority of our astronomy, our biology, our physics, our chemistry, and others is, we fervently believe, as certain as the pole star. Unlike astrology and alchemy, they will never be questioned; they will be built upon.

It is a central tenet of our faith in science that the new will encompass the old in one endless and eternal conservation of sense and sensibility. In this cathedral, we worship a database. We can see outward to the edge of what is, and downward into time was to (almost) the moment of Creation. We can see inward into (almost) the mute heart of matter. We have the proven method. We have the hard evidence. We know that nothing is, in time, beyond our knowing. All doubt has been removed. We are the Alpha and Omega. Our science is now as eternal and as deeply grounded in truth as… well, as astrology was in 5 B.C.

Somewhere around 5 B.C. three of the world’s leading astronomers/astrologers noticed something unusual in the sky. It could have been a comet. It could have been a supernova. It could have been a rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. Whatever it was, it was strange enough for them to travel toward it. Or so it is said. Or so it is written. Or so it is remembered from the time of myth.

Myth or history? What is the reality of this road trip towards an obscure birth in a wretched town, during a not very pleasant passage in history, over 2,000 years in our past?

We do not know. We cannot know. As it is in so much else that we ignore it is not given to us to know.

We have only shards of pottery and fragments of texts snatched from desert caves or teased out of the soil with tin trowels and brushes. We have only the sifted detritus of history; a global jigsaw puzzle where ninety-nine percent of the pieces have long gone to dust.

Our past is a handful of ashes. It is beyond our gift to ever know the difference between an inspiring folk tale and the eyewitness accounts of something that, even today, would occupy the realm of the miraculous. For today, in the realm of the mysteries, we no longer have any time for the good or the beautiful; we have no time for miracles. We have only time for denigration.

In 2004 Time and Newsweek, endeavored, in their ham-fisted way, to gin up some circulation with articles that purported to “examine” the miracles surrounding the intersection of the Divine with a world now buried two millennia deep in the ash of the Earth. We shall probably see the same sort of thing this year. The cheapening of the spirit in this culture,” the expense of reason in a waste of shame,” by those whose lamp of the soul burns low, is now as predictable as the winter solstice.

In the manner of these mind-numbing and soul-destroying publications, and the habits of the sodden intellects that grind them out for small silver, a lot of time was spent on the “question” of the Virginity of Mary, the mother of Christ. It’s a scurrilous bit of work. A “hit piece” on Mary, in the jargon of the magazine trade. For all the preening of these publications, the articles were just two chunks of thinly veiled anti-Christian porn, sops to secular hedonists in search of a cheap thrill by imbibing another hit of their favorite pap. These kinds of magazine articles always strike a chord of sadness in me, because I know at last the true cost of creating them. They are a curious kind of self-damnation in life, and, as a result, a waste of life.

Beneath all the buffed prose and appeals to experts and phoned-in quotes from scholars, the articles rose to little more than the coarse chortling of fraternity boys in the early drunken hours of the morning: “A virgin? Right! Sure. Any wife’d tell her husband that if she suddenly…”

In the offices of Time and Newsweek, there is no room for wonder beyond the fact that, for fewer people every passing year, they are still publishing and still making payroll. So far. Anything else, anything that might have within it the spark of the divine, is fit for nothing except denigration. This belief squats at the cold dead center of their editorial philosophy, a philosophy they share with untold millions of our coarsened fellow citizens. And still, they cannot comprehend why year after year, no matter how cheap they price their subscriptions, their circulation continues to decline. In none of their editorial meetings do any of those attending look about them and declare that they have become “an alien people clutching their gods” in a land that finds them more and more dispensable.

We will leave them in their conference rooms high above the Avenue of the Americas, and wish them a “Happy Holiday. Have a good one.” It is far more interesting to ponder, instead, those ancient ancestors who had no doubts that what they had seen in the heavens was unusual enough to travel.

In 5 B.C. “travel” was not something undertaken lightly. It involved, across distances that would seem trivial today, risks of life and death at every turn. It required wealth and endurance. Few traveled for pleasure. Traveling at all required a motivation far beyond the ordinary. So, at the very least, while we cannot know what was in the sky in those days, we can be certain it was something very unusual.

In his short story, “The Star,” Arthur C. Clarke’s Jesuit narrator of the far future discovers the remnants of a civilization destroyed by a violent nova so that its light might announce the birth of Christ on Earth. The story has that ironic twist that is popular with authors and pleasing to readers. I remember it as making an impression on me when I was around 12 years old. But the story does not age well because the science of it, like all science, does not age well. The story is just 53 years old.

In 1957, when I was twelve years old, we all lived in a far smaller universe with far fewer stars for God to destroy by way of cosmic birth announcements. Now that the inventory of His stars has increased a billion-fold, I think it is safe to say He could have found one to suit His purpose that didn’t involve destroying a blameless alien race. He could simply pick one deeper in the field and, well, ramp up the photons. That sort of thing is just an afterthought once You’ve got omnipotence. It might even do double duty if You could use a star in an area that might need a few more heavy elements across the next brief one or two billion years of Your plan.

Sages and mystics, Eliot and Clarke, and a host of others have all had their turns with the story of The Star. In the end, it remains what it was when it began, a story. The story of a road trip by three astrologers, kings, wise men. A journey by men who saw something special in the heavens and determined to follow it wherever it led, no matter what the cost.

To see something special. To see something beyond yourself and your imaginings. To follow it wherever it leads. To always remain prepared for miracle. That is the inner music of the story of The Star. Like all stories that survive, it is the music of the heart and not of the head, and like the heart, it will endure.

“Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.”

To have “evidence and no doubt.” That is what those that put themselves forward as our “wise men” seem to propose to us day after day from their sterile rooms high above the avenues. They have the “data” from which we should derive, they insist, doubt about all that for which they have no evidence, no data.

First and foremost in their blinded vision is their iron requirement that we should doubt the original myths that have made us and sustained us as individuals and as a people across the centuries. In their pointless world, they would have us cast off the old myths and embrace their “new and improved myths — complete with evidence;” myths made of purposeless matter “hovering in the dark.”

And seeing what these “wise men” have become, seeing who and what they are we turn. We turn away.

Instead, every year a bit more it seems, a tide has shifted in the hearts of men and we turn like a lodestone to the deeper myths of the human heart; that place where The Star will always shine — always within and yet always beyond us. In the end, the Mystery is the Gift.

O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn [continue reading…]

(1) Matt Taibbi on Twitter: “1. THREAD: The Twitter Files THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP Part One: October 2020-January 6th” / Twitter

6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.” pic.twitter.com/lr66YgDlGy

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

“Live Not By Lies” by Solzhenitsyn

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.

And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? And from that day onward he:

· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;

· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;

· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;

· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;

· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;

· Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;

· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;

· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;

· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies. But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.

‘Twitter Files 2’ Drops Revealing Massive Censorship Operation, Secret ‘Blacklists’ for Conservatives & Shadowbans Confirmed – Becker NewsThe group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”

This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.

This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”

One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok —an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”

It will be funny when Twitter abandons San Francisco, leaving the city with a huge, gushing thirty million dollar tax hole, plus a sudden surplus of office space made available depressing rents.

Amazon.com: Archie Mcphee Instant underpants. Just add water I got this as a gag Valentine’s gift for a coworker and while I am hysterically laughing at the outcome, it was a bit more dangerous than I thought it would be. He put it in the kitchen sink and started out recording, but it didn’t do anything so he gave up on it and went into the other room and sat down.

As he questioned what would happen next, he heard an explosion from the other room equivalent to one of those party poppers, he said it almost sounded like a gunshot, and he just kind of froze for a moment before getting up to slowly peer his head around the corner to the kitchen.

He cautiously approached the sink and saw the white puck still there with a hole blown out of the center, then noticed water droplets falling from the ceiling causing him to look up and discover pieces of his underpants hanging from the ceiling. He described the smell as sort of like a Febreze air spray, mixed with pine and something else unpleasant and at that moment his smoke detector went off so he grabbed the closest fan-like object he could which were paper plates and began jumping up and down toward his high ceilings in his evening robe and husky slippers attempting to fan the smoke.

He said it dissipated fairly quickly, but after the alarm stopped going off he heard two dogs yapping and barking, and his neighbor from across the hall yelling to her husband that their dog wouldn’t stop pooping. I expected them to turn into soggy underwear or just fall apart, but in no way expected an explosion. 4 stars because that was the best thing I have ever heard but it lost a star for the unexpected danger!

When Advertisers Used Women in Tiny Miniskirts to Promote Computer Systems, 1960s-1980s – Rare Historical Photos

And the Strange Daze cascade continues at Strange Daze Beyond Shadowbanning on The New American Digest. Members only.

Fascinating and easy to watch.

Full Joe Rogan Spotify  Interview is HERE.

“And the moon rose over an open field. . . .”

From a discussion at The Chinese Communists’ Attack on America: 2 Commenters Gone to Look for America

Joe Krill Yesterday: It would be refreshing if ThisIsNotNutella was a little more direct. Just say what is on his/her mind. Being direct can be refreshing if not enlightening. Based on his/her earlier comments I would assume that he/she is not even an American citizen. I feel it would be worthwhile for any or all people who are interested in the Bible, to study the lives of the leaders and prophets. You will quickly come to the conclusion that most of them had a lot of major flaws. Maybe that is why God used them.

ThisIsNotNutella: I’m not an American Citizen. I’m a subject (there are no Citizens in the current year, Citizen) of one of the slavish, crotch-sniffing Anglosphere satrapies of the GAE (as in the Global American Empire).

Born a White South African, so I know a thing or two about capital R Reality vs. Bullshit Feel Goods.

I live in China and have lived in other parts of Asia and South-East Asia for most of my adult working life. This does not make me a shill. It makes me more able to see small and large differences in outlooks and outcomes and worldviews. Doesn’t always make me right, but the one-eyed man in the land of the blind and all that…

Far from being insightful or a prophet and often wrong about things, but still there’s something to be said for being a Stranger in a Strange Land. Do that long enough and you see everywhere else with fresh eyes.

For a good deal of this overseas life I, too, drank the Western Civ Rah-Rah Kool-aid. But eventually, I just couldn’t help registering the contrasts and dissonances between what media and all right-thinking (hah) people told me and what I saw all about me.

So no, I’m not an American. I have visited America and quite like the place and the ordinary people. As a teenager and young man, I saw you people as near as anything to gods bestriding the earth. Now I just feel immense sadness and anger at what you have done to yourselves and will, in your national death-throes do to the rest of us all.

Continued for Members Only at 2 Commenters Gone to Look for America

Rocking the Mario Look is always attractive to young boys.

BREAKING: #ButtPlugDean Joe Bruno Flees Scene and Hides Inside School When confronted by O’Keefe

On How Roaches Run When the Light Come On

[continue reading…]

We’d finished filming John and Yoko for the video a day or so before he was shot to death. It was their last video, but of course, we didn’t know it at the time. There was film of them holding hands and walking in Central Park in the place that would later become “Strawberry Fields.” We’d filmed them rolling naked in bed together in a Soho Art Gallery where she looked healthy and ample and he looked small and slight, with skin that was almost translucent. I remember being slightly surprised by the fact that Lennon’s need for Ono was so constant and palpable. He was seldom more than two feet away from her side and had the disconcerting habit of calling her “Mommy” whenever they spoke.

My role was as “executive producer” which really meant that I was to stand around with a roll of hundred dollar bills and pay-off the Teamsters and solve other problems with copious applications of money. It was an odd job in more ways than one, but I was grateful to have it at the time.

We’d sent the last of the film to the lab, and my old friend and director Ethan Russell had gone back to Los Angeles to begin editing. The crew had dispersed and I’d taken to my bed racked with pain. The job, this time, had been so tough and high stress that my neck had gone out. I could barely turn my head without feeling as if a sledge was hammering a hot-needle into the cervical vertebrae. I was lying carefully propped on the bed eating Bufferin as if they were Tic-Tacs and trying not to move. My neck was held in one of those tight foam collars. Not moving was the best thing to do at the time and I was doing it with all my might.

It was a small one-bedroom apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. My first wife and I were there after three years of living in London, Paris, the Algarve, and other European locations. She was eight months pregnant with our daughter and looked as if she was trying to smuggle a basketball across state lines for immoral purposes. Her mood, never really cheerful, was not improved by her situation.

The apartment was on loan from her uncle’s girlfriend. I was down to my last few thousand dollars and was looking for a job. The film gig had been a gift from my old friend Ethan, and I’d been glad to get it. But it was over and, with a baby banging on the door of the world, things were not looking up. At the time, the only thing looking up was me since my neck required me to lie flat and gaze at the ceiling. It had been a rough two weeks but I thought things would certainly improve.

And of course, that’s when things got worse. It got worse in the way most things do, the phone rang and my wife called out, “It’s for you.”

Some New York wag once said, “Age fourteen is the last time in your life when you’re glad the phone is for you.”

I groped blindly to the side of the bed and picked up the extension. It was Ethan calling from an editing room in Los Angeles. “John’s been shot. He’s dead.” [continue reading…]

Jerry Yellin, (February 15, 1924 – December 21, 2017) was the Last Fighter Pilot. Absent God’s grace, we will not see his like again.

[HT: Venlet]

“Will cast its shadow on Nippon’s very shores.”

A live news report as the attack is going on.

“Once again, like it’s 1940 all over again,

we have the weakest, most inept, hollow, incapable, and underwhelmingly weak land, sea, and air forces of any time since that day.

Once again, we’ve let a pipsqueak nation from the region get to a position of being able to threaten our interests and our national safety, largely through disinterest and pure chicken-shitted short-sightedness in our nominal leadership.

And once again, we’ve forgotten the proper way to deal with intransigent militant religious fanatics, by explaining our side of the argument to them by the kiloton, using the White Ball Of Enlightenment.

Mark my words: because of our national policy of head-up-the-ass stupidity and a national memory shorter than the presidency of William Henry Harrison, we’ll end up having to surge up a massive war machine, rebuild a massive naval fleet, re-learn large-scale amphibious assault and island-hopping tactics, get involved in another land war in Asia, and pop nukes on cities to get certain peoples’ attention, and settle the argument. All over again.” Raconteur Report: How Quickly We Forget

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

"Europe is a Garden. We have built a garden. Everything works.
…Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden…The gardener's have to go to the Jungle"
Is it not time for Colonialism to stop, surely Europe has done enough damage already..? pic.twitter.com/ZKZjAnOj7u

— Mick Wallace (@wallacemick) December 4, 2022

This is the administration that trotted out Old Joe in front of an ominous, Nazi-reminiscent red-and-black backdrop, flanked by two Marines, to declare that half of the American electorate represents “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” The authoritarians are in charge now, and they are continuing their self-appointed role as the guardians of what you may and may not see and hear. Elon Musk, with his commitment to the freedom of speech, which is the foundation of any free society, has them frightened and enraged. Watch for determined efforts on the part of the Biden administration and its allies to crush Musk and his free Twitter. The victor will determine the direction of the United States for the entire rest of its life as a nation: freedom or slavery?

The witch-hunt against Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is not in the public interest. 80% of 3.3 million people voted to end the injustice. A clear message to @JoeBiden. The people have spoken. They want the truth. Stop turning those who expose Government crimes into criminals. pic.twitter.com/CNfsZjhnNI

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 5, 2022

Why the Deep, Visceral, Crazy hatred of Putin? –I could understand the fierce loathing of Putin if he had murdered millions of his citizens (like Pol Pot) or of other countries. Or if he was behind the overthrow of democratically elected governments using his old outfit, the KGB. I would not be asking this question if Putin had incarcerated the Uighurs in concentration camps and made them slave laborers.

If we are going to use the standard of “bad behavior” as the measure of whether a world leader is good or evil, I think there is a compelling case that China’s Xi Jinping, for example, is a more dastardly character than Putin in terms of his actions both domestically and internationally. Yet, members of the G-20 had no qualms about getting a photo with Xi but had to grab the fainting couch at the prospect of being snapped standing next to Putin.

I have never seen anything like this. It is juvenile, stupid and dangerous.

Could MrBeast Be The First YouTuber Billionaire? He’s the most-subscribed-to YouTube personality in the world, with 112 million. His earnings, already the highest of any social media creator, are set to double in 2022 to as much as $110 million. “A lot of people still see YouTubers as a subclass of influencers,” he says. “They still just don’t truly understand the influence a lot of creators have.”

Continued for quite some ways over The New American Digest: Strange Daze Half Asleep in a Fake Empire

HT: The Timewasting Genius: daily timewaster: Sneaker Wave in Oregon

So I’m standing in line in a sandwich shop down San Diego way, waiting to see if two chicken salad sandwiches will yield any change from a $20 (They don’t.) when this guy my pal knows staggers in the door and joins the line. He’s the blonde, aging, and pear-shaped frat-boy type common in the whiter parts of San Diego. He’s on a life pension from his grandparents; something common in these Californicated places. As such he’s an elite member of the Maynard G. Krebs Zero-Work Brigade and not accustomed to reversals of fortune.

Looking at him this AM it is possible to see he is a reasonably good-looking man, but just. This is because, besides a distinct wobbling lurch in his step, he also appears to have gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime.

His nose is thickened along with the rest of his face, and not just from a lifetime’s love affair with single malt. There’s a huge frresh scab across the bridge of his nose and a larger one crusting-up along the side of his jaw and under his chin giving off a rusty red gleam like some strawberry skid-marks. Both his eyes have large, dark circles around them as if they’ve gotten special attention from a ball-peen hammer, and their expression is that of a man who’s just walked out of a fire-fight in the Afghan hills into a starring role in Lone Survivor.

My pal knows this guy and introduces me. I shake his trembling hand and say, as anyone would, “What happened to you?”

“I had a bad day on Wednesday.”

“Obviously,” said my pal.

“Can I tell you about it?,” he asked.

“Obviously,” said my pal.

“Well, I get up in the morning and go out to the garage for my car. And my car’s condition just.. just… it stops me cold.

”It’s got a flat and the tire that’s flat is the spare that I put on the week before but neglected to replace because, hey, who gets two flat tires in a week, right?

”So I have no spare and have to get the tow truck to come out and take the car to Discount Tire and me to Budget Rent a Car for some wheels. They rent me a car and I drive away for the rest of my day intending to pick my car up in the late afternoon. I do some errands and go home and hang around there for a few hours.

“Finally it’s time to pick up the car and take the rental back. I call the tire shop and they tell me I’m good to go. So I pick up the keys and go out to the car that’s parked at the top of my driveway.

“At some point in my walk, I notice there’s a bee buzzing around my head. Then I notice three bees and then an entire swarm and they are all swooping and diving at me and trying to sting me.”

At this point, the sandwich line and the entire sandwich shop have slowed to a crawl, listening.

“I get stung three times on the forehead, four times on one arm, twice on the other, and six times on my right leg.” (Polo shirts and shorts are the uniform of choice in this town.)

“So I’m whirling around and waving my arms and trying to get to my rental car when I notice that the bee swarm is thickest between me and the car.

“That’s when I decided to do one thing and one ting only. Flee!

“I turn around and still waving my arms all around me begin to run at top speed down the slope of my driveway towards the street about thirty yards away down the slope.

“Running downhill at speed in flip-flops isn’t, I’m here to tell you, a great idea since at some point I feel my hip give and, boom, I perform a perfect face plant in the asphalt.

“The good news is that this seems to throw the bees off since they leave me alone. The bad news is this face. The worse news is that just when I think that I’ll just lie there, phone 911 on my cell and wait for the paramedics since I can’t walk, my hip pops back in and I’m able to sneak around the house, and into the rental and drive myself to the emergency room.”

My pal and I murmur our condolences and gather up our sandwiches.

“Thanks,” he says. “But that’s not the best part.”

“No?”

“Nope. When I came out this morning to go to work, another tire was flat. I walked here and now I’m afraid to go home.”

The New American Digest is now just over three months old. In that time I’ve striven to create posts and items for your enlightenment, entertainment, and information. Although always a kind of boutique operation, I like to think that The New American Digest delivers, as the Brits say, “Value for money.”

There are now more than 140 posts here with more at the door. (see above and below for sample headlines)

In a heartening response, this page has hundreds of members. Of these, some hundreds are “free” memberships. This means that members with a free account see many but not all of the posts here. I’m hoping to keep it that way.

If you are one of my free members I would like to ask you to consider becoming a paid member. Your support enables me to work on more personal posts, my forthcoming book of essays, The Name in the Stone,  and write some of the many hundreds of drafts I maintain like those shown above and below.

If you are one of my paid members, God bless you.

If you can afford a paid membership I would be most grateful for your support.

Yours truly,

Gerard Van der Leun

Why? Because I say so.

At the New American Digest: The Chinese Communists’ Attack on America: First “The Pledge” Now “The Turn” Next “The Prestige”