Tom Ripley Goes to Congress

 

Wow, I can't believe nearly two years has elapsed after my last post.  I finally found inspiration to rouse myself out of my blogging slumber.

Any of you who pays attention to politics likely knows about the controversial election of Republican George Santos to the House of Representatives in the 3rd Congressional district of New York this past November.  It was a district previously represented by now retired Democrat Tom Suozzi, who had made a failed attempt to win the Democratic primary in the New York governor's race.  

Santos had previously run against Suozzi in 2020 and lost.  However, a number of things had changed in the subsequent two years.  As mentioned above, Suozzi gave up his seat for an unsuccessful campaign to be the Democratic candidate for governor.  Numerous candidates competed for the Democratic nomination for the congressional seat, which was ultimately won by an at least to me unknown Robert Zimmerman, whereas Santos's bid to get the Republican nomination for the 2022 election was uncontested.  With New York state losing a congressional seat in the 2020 census, district lines had to be redrawn.  But the biggest change, in my opinion, was the backlash against Democrats on Long Island, where I live, due to fears about crime, illegal immigration and inflation, among other things.  While the much hyped Red Wave largely fizzled out nationwide, New York bucked that trend.

Being an independent voter with no party affiliation, I briefly considered voting for Santos, but thought better of it when reading of his association with Harbor City Capital.  Furthermore, I could not abide a Republican majority in the Congress with the right wing performance trolls like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert having outsized influence.  While I voted for Democrat Robert Zimmerman, sadly Santos handily won the election by 54.1% to 45.9%.

But it was over a month after the election that things got really interesting.  A New York Times investigative report (subscription required) revealed that George Santos had fabricated most of his life story, education and work experience.  In other words, Santos perpetrated a fraud on the voters of the 3rd district.

Interestingly, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) still has its candidate page for Santos up with no acknowledgment of the allegations raised against him.  Among the celebratory and affirming statements made about him are these tidbits:

"George is an experienced businessman, financier and investor, with extensive work in capital introduction, real estate, capital markets, bio-tech and M&A. He has experience delivering results in the world of business and now he will take that same drive to Washington to deliver results for New York’s Third Congressional District."

"George’s mother was in her office in the South Tower on September 11, 2001, when the horrific events of that day unfolded. She survived the tragic events on September 11th, but she passed away a few years later when she lost her battle to cancer."

The archived web page of his biography from his 2020 campaign boasts a number of accomplishments, including the following:

Graduating from Baruch College in economics and finance.

Working at Citigroup and then being promoted to associate asset manager at its real estate division.

Founded and ran a nonprofit 501(c)(3) called Friends of Pets United (FOPU) from 2013 - 2018, an animal rescue operation, which was able to effectively rescue 2400 dogs and 280 cats, and successfully conducted the TNR (trap neuter and release) of over 3000 cats.  

Then there the statements he made to the Republican Jewish Coalition about being a "proud Jew" and his claim that he had grandparents who fled the Holocaust.  It should be noted that part of the district in which Santos ran has a sizable Jewish constituency in towns such as Great Neck on the north shore of Long Island.

Virtually everything Santos said was an outright lie or fabrication.  When the allegations came to light, Santos's response was to dismiss it as mere embellishments to his record.  But an embellishment is to inflate an actual achievement to make it more impressive.  For example, claiming to have graduated with honors from Baruch College instead of just having gotten a degree.  Or boasting of becoming a manager in a division at Citigroup instead of just being an employee in the division.

There is no record of Santos having ever even attended Baruch College.  Around the time he claimed to have worked at Citigroup, Santos was actually working at a call center in Queens for $15 per hour.  There is no record that his mother was working in the Twin Towers on 9/11, which he alleged in a tweet that the 9/11 attack claimed the life of his mother, even though she died from cancer in 2016.  There is no evidence that Santos has any Jewish ancestry and he responded to the allegations raised against him that he merely said he was "Jew-ish", not "Jewish."  

Truth is, there are so many lies, misrepresentations and controversies surrounding George Santos, that it's too exhausting for me to even attempt to categorize them all here.

The crux of the matter for me is this, if all of his falsehoods and true background had been revealed before Election Day, would it have resulted in Santos losing the election?  Or, in an alternative universe, had Santos run on his actual record of education (or lack thereof) and work experience, would he have even gotten the Republican nomination, let alone won the general election?  There has been a lot of blame being thrown around.  Some at the local Democratic organization and the Zimmerman campaign for not exposing these falsehoods during the campaign.  There's also the failure of the Republican Party to properly vet Santos before supporting him.  There's plenty of embarrassment to go around here.

The important thing though is what can be done?  I attended a couple of rallies calling for Santos to either resign or be investigated, including one yesterday in Douglaston, Queens.  Above is a photo of yours truly holding the admittedly put together at the last minute sign, which made it into an article about the rally by the conservative New York Post.  

As the wording beneath $CAMTO$ RESIGN! reads "You shouldn't get rewarded with a seat in Congress for doing something that would get you FIRED in the private sector!"  The analogy I use is someone who gets hired for a position by a company based on his education and work credentials, but that if the employer subsequently discovered the credentials were completely bogus, that person would be fired.  How many persuadable voters pulled the lever for Santos because they believed the professional experience he touted made him a good candidate to serve in Congress?

Granted, for the MAGA Trump base who supported him, Santos could have run for office relying on his experience as a call center employee and they still would have voted for him because all Democrats are evil and an existential threat to the American way of life.  But enough moderate Republicans and independents might have switched their vote to Zimmerman had Santos run on his actual record.

George Santos has already demonstrated that he lacks any kind of integrity or moral compass to voluntarily resign from Congress now that his lies have been revealed for all to see.  But there is a possibility that he can be pressured to resign by other Republicans if sufficient pressure is brought to bear.  As I tried to explain to the reporter for the Republican biased New York Post, if Santos is allowed to serve a full term while more embarrassing revelations come to light, there is a good chance that the Democrats can flip the seat back in 2024.  But if Santos is forced out now and a special election is held with the Republican candidate being a recognized local name with well established credentials, if that Republican can win the special election, he or she will go into the 2024 election with the advantage of incumbency.  By then George Santos will have disappeared from the public memory.  But if he serves his full term, he will hover like a dark cloud over the election for the Republicans, even if he is not the nominee.  It's better to bear the brunt of the embarrassment and ditch him now than allow it to remain an open sore for the next two years.

It has come to be expected that candidates for political office will tell fibs or make some misrepresentations about themselves.  One example that comes to mind is Hillary Clinton's claim when she was seeking her party's nomination in 2008 about having to dodge sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia when she was First Lady.  Or Elizabeth Warren having made representations of Native American ancestry in her past that came to light when she sought elected office.  However, what Santos did was manufacture an almost entirely fictional identity.  He must be removed from Congress to set a precedent that candidates cannot be allowed to get away with such egregious lies about their qualifications for Congress.  For example, while Elizabeth Warren's alleged Native American ancestry was justifiably embarrassing for her, she did not lie about where she went to college, that she got a law degree from Rutgers University or that she was a tenured professor at Harvard.  These are true and verifiable accomplishments of hers.  These were part of her qualifications to serve in the United States Senate.  When you take away the false claims about his past work history and look at his real record, what is there about George Santos that makes him a viable candidate to serve in the United States House of Representatives?  Just about nothing.

Given how much of a serial liar and fabulist Santos is, how can anyone, either in Congress, or local elected officials and activists in his district, work with him in good faith?  How can Santos be trusted with confidential information?  In addition to his many falsehoods, there is also the question as to where Santos recently acquired so much money to loan to his campaign?  Who is secretly funding him?  This makes him a potential national security risk.

George Santos must either resign or be expelled from Congress as soon as possible for the good of the people of the 3rd Congressional District, as well as for the country in general.  I will do what I can to help make that possible.

Did Communist China Unleash Coronavirus to Keep Trump From Being Reelected?

Over the past months, I have seen some Trump supporters on FaceBook claim that COVID-19 was unleashed by China to damage Donald Trump so as to hurt his chances at winning reelection in the 2020 presidential race.  

According to the theory I have seen presented, Trump's trade war, which he initiated in the spring of 2018, had China's economy on the ropes, and then when it was clear that the impeachment effort against him over the Ukraine scandal in late January/early February of 2020 was not going to succeed, the virus was set loose to achieve what impeachment could not.

If one looks at it at a superficial level, the timing certainly appears to be suspicious.  Before COVID-19 reached epidemic levels in the United States, the US economy was performing better than ever in American history, according to Trump's supporters.  Had the pandemic occurred a year earlier or a year later, the pandemic either would have slowly come under control leading up to Election Day in November of 2020, and if it had broken out a year later, it would have not yet reached pandemic levels in time to be a factor in the election.  

But does this theory hold up under scrutiny?  Let's look at some counterarguments.

1. What was the mechanism to spread COVID-19?

If you were China and you wanted to infect a critical mass of United States citizens with the virus, I can only think of two ways.  One, have dozens or more government agents who have obtained visas to travel to the United States injected with the virus just before they are ready to depart so that they can enter America before they develop the symptoms.  Two, which likely would be more difficult, would be to bring samples of the virus with them in some kind of secure containers that they could then use to infect themselves and/or others.  Once arrived in the United States, they would be in a position to visit public places as they start to develop symptoms and then cough and sneeze around people so as so spread the infection to them.  An advantage to this is that it would create plausible deniability for the PRC government.  So many Americans would have become infected that the Chinese agents would just be among a small number of countless infected people.  They could lie about when they first started to feel symptoms so as to throw off contact tracing efforts.  How easy would it be for local and federal health officials to connect the dots?

What do we know about the entry of COVID-19 into the United States?  The first case reported by the CDC was on January 21, 2020.  

"The patient from Washington with confirmed 2019-nCoV infection returned to the United States from Wuhan on January 15, 2020.  The patient sought care at a medical facility in the state of Washington, where the patient was treated for the illness. Based on the patient’s travel history and symptoms, healthcare professionals suspected this new coronavirus. A clinical specimen was collected and sent to CDC overnight, where laboratory testing yesterday confirmed the diagnosis via CDC’s Real time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) test."

Notice what happened.  The patient sought medical attention, which was then reported to the CDC.  Someone deliberately trying to spread the virus in the United States would not bring attention to him or herself by seeking help and identifying where he or she came from.

2. How Could China Micromanage A Global Pandemic?

So if the PRC did not send deliberately infected agents to the United States, could they have done it elsewhere?

My state, New York, was one of the first states that was really hit hard by the pandemic, with the virus having entered from travelers from Europe.

Led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine researchers, the new study used gene testing to trace the origins of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the pandemic virus, throughout the New York City region in the spring. It showed that the virus first took root in late February, seeded by at least 109 different sources that burst into chains of infection, rather than from a single “patient zero.”

The study revealed that the genetic codes of the virus in New York more closely matched those of strains from Europe or other U.S. states rather than those from China, where the virus originated. In addition, some of the early chains of infection from person to person ran at least 50 people long.

According to Trump supporters, because of the restrictions on travel into the United States that Trump imposed at the end of January of 2020, the Chinese would need to find an alternative way of striking at us.  Europe would be a logical back door.

But how would they go about doing this? To go back to my first question, did they send government agents infected with the virus to Europe in the hope that they could sneeze and cough on enough people that a critical mass of them would travel to the United States to achieve community spread here within a narrow window of opportunity?  

If someone reading this wants to propose a plausible scenario to explain this, I would love to hear from you.

How Could China Know How Trump Would Respond?

If there was one overarching theme to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, it was that he would protect America from bad people and bad things.  His infamous speech that kicked off his campaign saw him rail against Mexican rapists, murderers and drug dealers.  He called for a "complete and total shutdown" of all Muslims entering the United States.

During the Ebola scare in 2014, Trump constantly railed against then President Obama for not doing enough to keep the Ebola virus out of the United States.  Below is a sampling of his tweets on the subject.

Now, based on Trump's rhetoric, I would have expected, and the PRC likely as well should have expected, that as soon as COVID-19 became known to the world, Trump would have instinctively acted to close off the United States to international travel from all countries, to use his words about banning Muslims, "until we can figure out what the hell is going on!"  Frankly, I was surprised Trump did not go what I call "Fortress America" and take this route.  Ironically, if he had, and it resulted in the United States experiencing significantly fewer COVID cases, Trump would have skated to reelection.

One can't argue that Trump didn't know how serious COVID-19 was, because Bob Woodward recorded a conversation he had with Trump on February 7 of 2020:

“It goes through the air,” Trump said in a recording of a Feb. 7 interview with Woodward. “That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.

“And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

And yet Trump waited until March 11 to announce restrictions on travel into the United States from Europe that took effect on March 13.  A few days afterwards, Trump confessed to Woodward that he likes to downplay the severity of the virus, as his public statements consistently claimed that the virus was under control and wouldn't be a problem.  

Was Donald Trump Winning the Trade War?

In order for COVID-19 to have been intentionally released by the People's Republic of China in response to Trump's trade war against it, it would need to be demonstrated that the trade war was causing serious harm to China's economy.

I think even Trump's most ardent detractors on this issue would admit that his trade policies did have at least some negative impact on China.  The question is, on balance, did China "lose" the trade war?

This article from NPR provides a nuanced take on the matter, while noting that China was already beginning to lose its competitive advantage as a country that provided low cost manufacturing.

But Devereux concedes that he had already been considering a move to Vietnam when the opening shots of the trade war were fired.

"Wages have been going up steadily over the years, which happens when you get a more educated populace," says U.C. San Diego's Shih.

A more educated population means fewer low-skilled workers for production lines in factories like Fangjie Printing and Packaging Company. Factories have to offer higher wages to attract the best workers. And those wages eat into the bottom lines of the companies that Devereux places in Chinese factories.

"If you look at Vietnam now, you've got wages being roughly one-third of what they are here in China," says Devereux. And so the trade war merely sped up his move out of China and into Vietnam. "Two or three of our American customers, knowing we were looking in Vietnam, asked us to accelerate that" when the trade war began, he says.

"Even in the absence of a trade war, China's growth rate would have come down. The trade war makes it worse, but the trade war is not the primary reason," says Shang-Jin Wei, an expert on the Chinese economy at Columbia University and a former International Monetary Fund official.

In response to Trump's tariffs, China stopped buying soybeans from the United States and turned to Brazil.  As a consequence of this, the Trump administration had to provide billions of dollars of aid to US soybean farmers.  Oddly enough, Brazil has the second highest number of COVID cases and deaths in the world.  Why would China want this to happen and possibly jeopardize its soybean supplies?  And if China could micromanage the spread of the pandemic to cause Trump to lose in 2020, then why couldn't they micromanage it enough to not infect so many people in Brazil?

What I Believe Happened and Donald Trump's Missed Opportunity

I have an alternative theory about what happened with the origin of COVID-19 that does not rely on a tin foil hat conspiracy while at the same time not letting China off of the hook.

While I can't prove it, I believe that it is entirely plausible that a lab worker at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was accidentally, and probably even unknowingly, infected with the virus.  I found this article dating from 2014 that discusses the problem of dangerous diseases that escape from laboratories. This lab worker, after getting infected, could have easily gone to one of the wet markets or some other public place in the city while asymptomatic and spread the virus to others.  It's also possible the virus originated in the wet market and it's just a coincidence that the virology institute happens to be in the same city.

Now here is where the problem lies with the People's Republic of China.  The current leader of China, Xi Jinping, is probably the most powerful read of the country since Mao Zedong and is seen as a new Mao.  During the "Great Leap Forward", China adopted a number of disastrous policies that resulted in the death of millions of people from starvation.  The misery and suffering went on as long as it did because the policies were decreed by Mao Zedong, therefore no one could tell him that these policies were a failure.

When COVID-19 began to spread in Wuhan, it was first noticed by an ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang.  On December 30, 2019, he sent a warning to fellow doctors in a group chat.  A few days later, he was visited by the local police warning him that he was making false statements and disturbing "the social order."  In other words, the local government officials in Wuhan needed to suppress information about the virus because it was embarrassing for them, and in the political climate of the PRC, it would make Xi Jinping look bad as well.  Consequently, by trying to suppress knowledge of the virus and its severity early on, the Chinese government officials responsible provided a window for the virus to not only become entrenched in Wuhan, but to spread beyond it as well.  Sadly, Doctor Li Wenliang himself died from the virus in February of 2020.

And now, to bring Donald Trump back into this, I believe the coronavirus pandemic was potentially a tremendous gift to him.  It was an opportunity to demonstrate real leadership that he ultimately failed badly due to his defects in character.

A lot of people, mostly on the Left, criticized Trump when he started to refer to COVID-19 as the "China virus."  They complained that it was racist and fanned the flames of xenophobia against Asian-Americans, and that it was just meant to deflect blame from his own failures.  I suppose it is possible, though I don't know if there is hard data to quantify it.  Some Trump supporters countered that why is it okay to refer to other epidemics with names such as the Spanish Flu or the German Measles, or mutations of the coronavirus as the UK variant or the South African variant, for example.

But given the political situation I described above in China, there was a much better name that Trump could have called the virus that squarely blamed the government of China for the pandemic while completely evading any accusations of racism or ethnic hatred.  Donald Trump could have and should have called it the Xi Jinping Virus.   It would have squarely placed the blame for the initial outbreak and spread of the virus on a man and his government.  I don't know if the idea ever occurred to Trump or any of his advisors.  But if it did, there was one reason why he couldn't have done this.  And the fault for that lies with Donald Trump.  On January 24, 2020, he posted this:

Now what strikes me as very odd about this tweet is that Trump's rhetoric had consistently portrayed the People's Republic of China as a bad actor on the world stage that could not be trusted.  Knowing what the government of China is, why would Trump praise China for its transparency and thank President Xi over its handling of the virus?  Was he not receiving briefings from his intelligence advisors about what was happening in China? It doesn't make sense to me why he would come across so naive and gullible in making such a public statement.  

Had Donald Trump called the virus the Xi Jinping Virus early on and called on his supporters to wear masks, socially distance and accept other measures to help him stifle the spread of the virus in the United States, I am absolutely convinced they would have fallen into line and done whatever he wanted.  Instead, one gets the impression that Trump just didn't want to seriously address the threat and foolishly hoped it would somehow work out alright in the end.  Why he didn't react to the threat of the virus early on like he ranted about Ebola in 2014 is a mystery to me.  Trump had a golden opportunity to tackle a threat and defeat it, which he foolishly squandered.

Is it possible that Communist China allowed the virus to spread out into the world in the hope that somehow it would spread in such a way as to cause the United States to be the worst hit?  I can't say with 100% certainty that it didn't happen.  But what seems more likely to me is that the virus was incredibly lucky to encounter a United States helmed by a man who could have done a much better job trying to thwart it if he had really tried.

The Return of Katrina and Gilbert

Last November, in my post On Becoming A Cat Person, two of the cats I wrote about who had become a part of my life were Katrina and Gilbert.  

Katrina was a frequent guest in our home who occasionally escaped, only to be recaptured after a few days, weeks or months.  After her last escape in May of 2020, she went her longest period of time outdoors.  She never left and basically lived on and under our backyard deck and coming to our patio door when she wanted to be fed.  With winter approaching in December, I decided to try and recapture her again.  I used the tried and true method to entice her into the house with food and then close the patio screen door, but she was wary of this and would bolt out of the house at the slightest suspicion that anything was afoot.  I decided to play the long game with her and let her come in the house night at night without making any attempt to shut her in so that she might let her guard down.  Then one night in mid-December, even with me standing right by the back door, Katrina strode into the dining room.  Amazed at my luck, I slid the patio door shut and just like that she was back in the house.  It was kind of funny, as she looked up in shock as she realized what happened to her.

One change I made after her previous stays with us was to block her access behind the love seat in the living room, as she would spend the majority of her day hiding behind or underneath it.  While Katrina is still very shy and won't let us pet her, if I put my hand in front of her, sometimes she will lean forward to sniff it and then I will touch her on the nose.  In some ways she is a little less shy than she was before.  Now she follows Snickers into the kitchen when he comes in to pester me to give him treats.  She is also more likely to nap out in the open and often seems unphased by our presence.  Sadly, she still has her frequent bouts of asthma attacks, and because she won't let me get close to her, I can't give her the medicine that I would give to Snickers when he would have his semi-annual respiratory issues.  Otherwise she seems to have settled back in nicely and often plays around with Snickers, sometimes even initiating contact with him and getting him to lick her fur.

The most stunning development though has been the unexpected return of a once daily visitor to our deck.  Around 5 am this past Thursday the 17th, I was excitedly awoken by my wife, who cried out "Honey, Gilbert is here!"  

The shaggy Maine Coon had not been seen by us since May of 2019, nearly two years.  While a part of me had held out hope over that time that Gilbert was out there somewhere and might still come back some day, I had pretty much written him off as gone for good.  But when I rolled out of bed and shuffled over to the back door that morning last week, there he was looking up at me.

I went out the front door with a bag of cat food and around the side of the house to the back to feed him as I had done so many times before.  As was his pattern of behavior in the past, he would retreat a few feet and then approach after I had put out the food.  He alternated between hissing if I got too close for comfort and then switching to a soft meow that belied his large stature.  One thing different I noticed about him is that the top part of his left ear was clipped off, which told me that at some point during the past 22 months someone had captured him and had him neutered.

We wondered if Gilbert was just making a guest appearance or if he would be a regular visitor again.  Well, not only did he come back, he pretty much didn't leave.  While we don't see much of him during the day time (we believe he is spending that time under our deck), Gilbert stays on our deck all night.  Not only that, he spends much of that time sitting right at our patio door staring in at us.  It's hard to tell what he wants.  I have put Snickers and Katrina away a few times and opened the door to give Gilbert the opportunity to come in, but when he does, it is tentative and fleeting, and he retreats back out to the deck usually after a few minutes.  I am not sure if he wants to live indoors with us but is just too shy to take that step, or if he is interested in Snickers and/or Katrina.  One change I have noticed in his behavior is that he will sometimes rub himself against the patio screen door and then lay on his back and roll around in a playful manner.  Assuming he stays, I might try to give him the time to become more comfortable with us and then see if I can entice him in and see if we can make him a house cat.  The wildcard in the equation is how Snickers and he will get a long, as having two male cats in the house might lead to territorial aggression between the two.  Though Gilbert is clearly a survivor, he is probably getting up there in years.  I don't know his age, but I would estimate he has to be at least 7 years old, as he was already fully grown when we first spotted him in the summer of 2016.  

Another development is that the other Maine Coon who has been a regular visitor in the last couple of years, Oscar, has practically vanished since Gilbert reappeared.  In the past week Oscar showed up and shared the deck with Gilbert only once.  I did not observe any hostility between them and they kept their distance from each other.   Then again, around the time Gilbert stopped showing up in May of 2019, he was almost immediately replaced by Oscar.  That suggests there is some kind of territorial dispute going on between them.  It would not surprise me though if Oscar is still close by in the neighborhood and that we will see him again someday in the near future.

First Blood and the Age of Black Lives Matter

Recently, the Sylvester Stallone movie First Blood has been playing a lot on cable.  I hadn't watched it in decades and I have to admit I had forgotten what a morally ambiguous film it is, as well as just being a flat out good movie.  I suspect what happened is that it got overshadowed by the following two sequels with their gung ho patriotic themes and John Rambo being an unabashed all-American hero who fights and defeats evil communists.

First Blood, which is adapted from a novel with the same name, gives us a very different Rambo.  A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, where we later learn he was "an expert in guerrilla warfare...In Vietnam his job was to dispose of enemy personnel. To kill. Period", Rambo back home in the United States is an aimless drifter who can't fit back into American society.

But what struck me as most interesting about First Blood is how it resonates with what has been happening in America in the last few years, particularly after the death of George Floyd last year, over the abuse of police authority and the violent reaction it can elicit.

In a short introduction, Rambo visits the home of a former comrade in arms from Vietnam only to find out that the man had passed away months earlier from cancer. He then proceeds to walk into a nearby town called Hope, only to draw the attention of the town sheriff Will Teasle, portrayed by Brian Dennehy.  Teasle accosts Rambo and offers to give him a ride out of town.  Though he tries to present a friendly face to Rambo, he becomes cross when Rambo asks him why the sheriff won't allow him to get a bite to eat in the town.  After briefly letting his mask slip, Teasle's friendly tone returns and he tells Rambo that it's a boring town and he gets paid to keep it that way.  One gets the sense that Teasle has probably dealt with numerous other outside drifters in the same way.

The scene below is where the plot of First Blood kicks into motion:

Sheriff Teasle drops Rambo off outside of town, offers him some patronizing advice, and then cheerfully wishes him a good day before driving away.  All Rambo has to do is keep on walking away from the town and the movie ends right there.  Instead, we see Rambo pause momentarily in thought and then defiantly walk back towards the town.  Teasle, seeing in his rear view mirror that Rambo has challenged his authority, turns his car back around and arrests Rambo.

Now, to be clear, Teasle is abusing his position as a law enforcement officer and is violating Rambo's civil rights.  Rambo has done nothing wrong to justify Teasle's treatment of him.  Still, while Teasle is clearly in the wrong, he is not an evil man.  From his perspective, he has probably seen his share of drifters come into the town and engage in petty crimes or mischief, and Rambo fit the profile, which is why he tried to expedite Rambo's passage out of the town.*  

Back at the station, we see Rambo being physically uncooperative when one of the deputies tries to take his fingerprints.  Another deputy becomes abusive towards Rambo, which triggers a flashback to torture he endured from his Vietnamese captors in the war, causing him to violently lash out and overpower a number of deputies before escaping.  Outside, he steals a motorbike from one of the town residents and rides off out of the town.

Flash forward to the climax of the movie.  After Rambo has evaded in turn the sheriff and then the National Guard trying to either capture or kill him, he makes his way back to the town and proceeds to blow up a gas station, a gun store and then shoots up the sheriff's station, before shooting and seriously wounding Teasle.  In his effort to keep the town boring, Teasle ultimately set in motion a chain of events that brought violence and destruction to the town.

What struck me as interesting about First Blood from a contemporary perspective is how it touches on the themes and arguments raised by both sides in the debate over police abuse of power and the responses to it in the Black Lives Matter protests across the country last year.  

A frequent complaint made by the Back the Blue crowd is that blacks who are either physically hurt or killed in encounters with police officers are often at fault because they are non-compliant and uncooperative.  If they would just do what the police officers ask them to do and be deferential and respectful, they would not be harmed.  If one watches Rambo from that perspective, shouldn't we see him as the bad guy in First Blood?   After all, Rambo chose to go back into town knowing that he wasn't wanted there.  When being processed at the station, he was uncooperative with the deputies, causing several of them to become more aggressive with him in response.  He physically assaults about five or six of them while escaping and he overpowers a town resident and steals his motorbike.  In the end, Rambo returns to the town like a one man Antifa or Black Lives Matter protest, engaging in violence and property destruction.  However unjustly he was treated earlier in the movie, are we supposed to root for him when he blows up a gas station and goes gunning for the sheriff?  

One thought I had was what if the events of First Blood happened in real life and Rambo was black, and we found out about it on the news?   Right wing talking heads like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity  would likely portray Rambo as a villain who engaged in violence against law enforcement and the property of law abiding small business owners.  

The left, on the other hand, would highlight the mistreatment Rambo suffered at the hands of law enforcement, which they allege is all too typical of the kind of harassment and injustice black Americans experience virtually every day in their encounters with the police.  If Americans are upset about the violence they see in some protests against police brutality, then they should address the problem of police brutality so that there won't be a need for such protests.

What makes First Blood a good movie is that it is not a typical 80's action movie with a clear cut good guy vs. bad guy plot.  Rambo just wanted to pass through town and maybe get a bite to eat while Sheriff Teasle just saw a potentially troublesome drifter whom he wanted to get out of town as quickly and quietly as possible.  Neither of them ever wanted things to turn out the way they did, but their choices and actions set in motion a chain of events that rapidly spirals out of control.  How many encounters between African-Americans and white police officers follow a similar pattern?

* In the book from which the movie is adapted, Sheriff Teasle is a Korean war veteran who is bitter because he believes that Vietnam vets are given too much attention at the expense of Korean war vets whom the public has largely forgotten.  This motivation is never spelled out in the movie.

Goodbye Trump!

 Now I won't be forced to say Merry Christmas anymore!*

*Because apparently that was one of his achievements.

Did The Portuguese Discover the Americas Before Columbus?

 

One of my favorite historical topics is the European voyages of discovery.  Not only were they pivotal in laying the foundations for the modern world, the writings of those who participated in these voyages provide us with eyewitness accounts, marred though many of them are by the writers biases and misunderstandings, of different peoples and cultures around the world as they were centuries ago.

Recently, a book caught my eye that I decided to read, Before 1492: The Portuguese Discovery of America, by a John Irany.  Apart from the Vikings reaching Newfoundland around the year 1000, I have often wondered if it was possible other European voyages reached the Americas before Columbus that remain unknown to us for a variety of reasons.

Irany argues that the Portuguese had explored the Americas before Columbus, and that the evidence for it is a map of the world from 1507 (see above) by a Martin Waldseemuller which features the continents of North and South America with Pacific Ocean coastlines, including the narrow isthmus connecting Central America with the South American continent.  The mystery of the map is how it could have represented the Pacific Coast with such uncanny accuracy when the first known European explorer to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean was Vasco de Balboa in what is today Panama in 1513.  Irany is of the opinion that the Waldseemuller map incorporates information the mapmaker received from Portuguese voyages that had over time explored the coastline of South America all the way around the southern tip and up the Pacific coast, because Portugal was the only kingdom at the time that could conceivably have the ability to conduct such voyages.

While the way the Americas are depicted in the Waldseemuller map is definitely interesting, I don't think Irany quite makes his case.  I do believe that it is possible that Portuguese navigators may have accidentally stumbled upon either the Brazilian coastline and/or one or more islands in the Lesser Antilles in the years before Columbus first voyage across the Atlantic.  For the better part of the 15th century, the Portuguese had been gradually working their way down the coast of Africa with the intent to eventually sail around it and across the Indian Ocean to India and the Spice Islands.  After rounding the West African bulge and reaching the Gulf of Guinea, they encountered the Benguela Current, which flowed counterclockwise and made it virtually impossible to proceed further down the coast.  To overcome it, the Portuguese developed an ingenious technique called a "volta do mar" which involved sailing westward with the current into the Atlantic and then following it as the current turned south and then east.  One can picture it as a series of loops.  It was in this way that Bartolomeu Dias was able to round the Cape of Good Hope and find the Indian Ocean.  While Christopher Columbus wins the lion's share of the fame for discovering the Americas, if one looks at it objectively, the voyage of Dias was far more impressive in terms of the sheer distance he sailed.

If you look at a map, you can see that the present day African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia are not that far across the Atlantic from the easternmost Brazilian state of Paraiba.  It is not inconceivable that one or more Portuguese navigators conducting a "volta do mar" sailed far enough to the west to make landfall on or at least see the Brazilian coast, which the Portuguese monarchy wanted to keep secret upon learning about it when the sailors returned home.  Irany also cites in his book a handful of instances from Columbus's later voyages where they encountered tantalizing traces of possibly earlier European contact with the natives, such as a native who had a crossbow.

I have some questions though which I would love to ask Irany if I had the opportunity, and which I will set forth here.

If the Portuguese were really engaged in the long term exploration of the Americas that provided the information for the Waldseemuller map, then why were there no permanent Portuguese settlements in the Americas that were extant at the time Columbus returned from his first voyage in 1493?  While it is understandable that the Portuguese may have wanted to keep any information about the discovery of the Americas a trade secret in the late 15th century while they focused on their primary objective of sailing into the Indian Ocean to have access to the riches and goods of Asia, there was nothing to stop them from establishing settlements that would have served as way stations.  It certainly would have strengthened their position in the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Tordesillas if they could say "Hey, we already know about this place and we have had our people living there for years!"

Even in the absence of permanent or even temporary settlements, one should reasonably expect that any Portuguese voyages to the Americas that predated Columbus would have left padraos, which are stone pillars Portuguese explorers would erect at places they made landfall along the Atlantic coast of Africa in the late 15th century.  If the Portuguese were also frequenting the coast of South America, then why were padraos not placed at various harbors or landing points there as well?   Had the South American coastline been dotted with padraos dating to the late 15th century, it would be strong evidence to support Irany's claim.  That they do not exist, in my opinion, seriously undermines his case.

Lastly, even if some Portuguese navigators had at a bare minimum sighted some part of the Americas in the years before Columbus, it had no impact on the course of history.  It wasn't just that Columbus discovered the Americas, but that its discovery was made known to the rest of Europe, and resulted in what historians have come to call the Columbian Exchange.  

I imagine that Irany would reply that one still has to explain the Waldseemuller Map.  I have to admit that I can't explain it.  One could, as have some have done, chalk it up to a lucky guess.  We don't know why Waldseemuller represented the Americas in the way that he did to anticipate a western coastline.  However, I am not prepared to make the leap to the belief that the information provided to him was compiled by decades of Portuguese naval expeditions sailing in secret all the way around Cape Horn and then up the Pacific Coast of the Americas all the way up to the Pacific Northwest.

The Curious Contradictions of Trump Supporters on Coronavirus

 

The guy who inspired my previous post about his desire to execute all Democrats for treason appeared in the comments section of the Facebook post above, which shares a sentiment I have heard expressed often, which is that the Coronavirus epidemic we have been experiencing is due to deliberate biological warfare waged by the People's Republic of China.

Let's pretend for the sake argument that it is true, China did this to us on purpose.  Then, if you are a die-hard America First Trump supporter, wouldn't it make absolute sense to do everything possible to limit the spread of virus so that it infects fewer Americans?   Like wear masks?  Engage in social distancing?  

For example, for reasons not entirely clear to me, motorcyclists are often represented as stalwart patriots who love America more than the average America citizen.  I don't know why, maybe because they like to sport American flag patches or fly flags on their motorcycles?  Wouldn't it be expected then that they would want to be in the vanguard of combating the "Chinese Virus"?  One way they could do that would be to agree to cancel the annual motorcycle rally held in Sturgis, South Dakota, where tens of thousands of them converge every year from all across the country, so as to prevent the state from turning into a coronavirus hot spot and then carry the virus back with them to their hometowns.  Nah, who am I kidding?  Many thousands of them decided it was more important to celebrate their freedumb, excuse me, freedom, by attending the gathering this past August.  A look at the graph chart below illustrates better than words could what happened next.

If memory serves, the rally ran from August 9 to August 21, and as you can see, not long after that, South Dakota's daily new COVID cases exploded.  And it was all preventable if the so-called patriots of America had exercised some self-restraint to fight the Chinese Virus.

Another contradiction I see from Trump supporters on Facebook is that on the one hand, they argue that concerns about Coronavirus are overblown because only 1% of people who catch it die from it, or they latch onto the misinterpretation of the findings that 94% of COVID deaths were from people who were already in ill health from other diseases, etc., but on the other hand they claim that Trump's China travel ban saved the lives of millions of American citizens.  But wait a second, if the mortality rate is so low, then even in the absence of a travel ban, hardly any more people should have died from it then did so with the travel ban.

Apparently Trump being consistently wrong about Coronavirus hasn't shaken their faith in him either.  Here is a comment dating sometime late March or early April from a Trump supporter who frequently comments on one of my anti-Trump friends Facebook posts.  This guy clearly only believed it at the time because it echoed what Trump was saying at the time, and because this guy would often claim "I trust Trump."

And here are Trump's classic "it may not come back at all in the fall" comments from the April 22 White House Coronavirus briefing.

In the same briefing, Doctor Fauci insisted that it would come back in the fall.  As I like to say, one of them ended up being right and the other one ended up catching Coronavirus in the fall and having to go to the hospital for treatment.  Of course, Trump supporters still stand by their president and deride Fauci as an idiot.  Go figure.

There's No Reasoning With These People

I took the screenshot of an exchange of comments I had in someone's Facebook post (and which will be the subject of a separate post on this blog).  As you can see, the commenter declared that "every Democrat should be executed."

I was curious to see if he meant Democratic politicians or anyone who is a registered Democrat, and in reply to my query, he made it clear that he meant all of them.  So, this psycho believes that tens of millions of Americans should be murdered for their political affiliation.  And I am sure he is not the only one who feels that way.

Personally, I have been registered as a non-affiliated voter for the better part of the last two decades, though before that I was a registered Republican who tended to vote for Libertarian candidates when they were on the ballot.  However, after George Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, I have voted for Democratic candidates in every presidential race from 2004 to the present.

While the political divide has always existed in America, what the Trump presidency, and in particular, this last presidential election, has exposed is that there is a fair number of people in this country who view many of their fellow Americans as an enemy to be eradicated.  

One of my operating theories about ardent Trump supporters is that he is their vicarious instrument for hurting the people they hate.  For example, when California suffers from devastating wildfires, Trump threatens to withhold federal aid because of some apparent failure to rake the forests, and Trump supporters are okay with that, because after all, California is home to left wing Hollywood supporters that they hate.  Egging on self-stylized civilian militias in Michigan to liberate their state, which emboldened some of them to plot to kidnap the state's governor, is not a deal breaker for them.

And then there is the prevalent view among them that the election was stolen from Trump and that Biden is an illegitimate president, even though Biden ended up amassing more than seven million votes than Trump.

I have long considered myself to be an optimist, but I am starting to fear for my country.  

 

On Becoming A Cat Person

From an early age I had a negative opinion of cats.  A big part of it could be that a couple of houses up the block from me lived what would be called one of those crazy cat ladies.  I believe she was also a hoarder before the term became popularized, as what little I ever saw of the inside of her home revealed stacks of newspapers, magazines, clothes, etc.  She probably had about a dozen cats congregating around her house, and she would leave food out for them.  When I would walk past her house on the way home from school, I often held my breath because of the overpowering stench of cat pee emanating from her property.  Around the same time, we got a pet dog, a miniature schnauzer, and so my early exposure to pets was a dog who always seemed happy to see me and eager to play with me.  

Over the years since my wife and I bought our house in 2000, we would periodically have mice roaming around, and my wife would occasionally float the idea of us getting a cat.  I was less than enthusiastic about it.  I loved dogs, and I didn't even want to get one of them, as working full time and raising two children was responsibility enough as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to May of 2016, and my wife tells me that she thinks there might be some cats living underneath our backyard deck.  I hadn't seen any cats yet, so I was skeptical.  But then a day or two later, while I was getting ready for work one morning, I saw a mother cat and her four kittens playing on our deck.  I started taking photos and videos of them and posting them on Facebook and I would buy cans of cat food and put them out on the deck to feed them.

This is a photo I snapped of Cersei nursing her kittens.

One of my friends who saw my posts on Facebook suggested I capture and try to find homes for them and offered me his trap.  Finding myself taken in with how cute the kittens looked when they were playing with each other and becoming increasingly fascinated with them and not wanting them to come to any harm, I took him up on his offer.  Since I wasn't quite sure what to do with them when I captured them, I purchased a large dog cage as a temporary holding pen.

On June 5, 2016, I set up the trap with a can of cat food inside as bait.  Within a half hour I heard the sound of the trap springing shut and went outside to investigate.  I had caught my first kitten.  I carried the trap down to the basement where I had the dog cage and opened up one end and shook the kitten out into the cage and closed it.  The little critter growled at me with anger and hostility.  "What did I get myself into?" I thought to myself.  I decided I would hold off on trying to capture the rest, as I didn't want to cram them all together into the dog cage.  Over the next several days, we would visit and spend time with the kitten and give him the opportunity to become accustomed to us.  By day four, the little cat had adapted enough that we felt we could take it out and let it roam around the house.  It's disposition had changed radically in such a short period of time that it was totally comfortable in our presence, as evidenced by this photo I took of our reflection in a mirror as he sat next to me on my bed.

I was worried that the mother cat might take the remaining three kittens with her and leave. At one point I did observe her walking across my backyard to the bushes with them behind her, as she appeared to be searching for their missing sibling.  But the next day they were back on the deck again, playing as if nothing had happened, while I continued to feed them.  The following weekend I tried my luck again and set up the trap.  This time I captured two more in quick succession and placed them in the dog cage.  Seeing how quickly the first kitten, who we named Snickers, adapted to us, we tried the same strategy with the next two.  We brought them to our kids rooms on the second floor of our house and they would hide under my son's bed, but setting out food and a litter box for them, I would notice that if we kept still, they would emerge to eat and do their business in the litter box.  Being used to taking dogs for walks where they would spend an eternity sniffing for a spot to pee and poop, I was greatly impressed that these kittens, who were roughly eight weeks old and newly caught after living outside, instinctively headed over to the litter box to carry out their bodily functions.  My respect for cats as pets rose instantly.

That left one last kitten and their mom to be captured.  I decided to name the mother Cersei after Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.  Just like her namesake in the show, Cersei loved her children but had them all taken from her.  While the trap would work on the last kitten, I did not expect it to work on Cersei, so I developed a different tactic.  Since she and her last kitten kept coming to our deck to be fed, I decided to open our back door and put out a plate of food a few feet inside the house.  Each time she would warily come into the house to eat, and each time I would move the plate a little bit further away from the door.  My plan was to eventually move the plate into the kitchen, and while Cersei was engaged in eating, I would quietly go out the front door and go around the house onto the deck and close the screen door.  

The day came about two weeks after I captured Snickers.  The back door was open and the plate of cat food was in the kitchen.  From my vantage point near the front door, I saw Cersei warily enter and then go into the kitchen, putting her out of my sight.  I went out the front and as stealthily as possible, I crept around to the back onto the deck and quickly closed the back screen door.  The trap worked.  But that ended up being the easy part.  Once Cersei realized what was happening, she started howling and trying to ram the screen door.  She then jumped up and clung to it, about five feet off the floor.  I went back into the house from the front, and if memory serves, I tried to use a broom to prod her off the screen door.  She jumped down onto the nearby dining room table, scattering and knocking over a bunch of items and then running into the living room and jumping up onto the bay window sill, letting out squirts of urine along the way.  I chased after her and then she jumped down to the floor and ran into the kitchen.  I went in and found her cowering under a small table in the corner of the room.  I grabbed the trap and the broom, and facing the open end of it towards her, I used the broom to try and prod her into it.  Surprisingly, it proved rather easy.  It seemed as if she just shut down and stopped trying to resist.  Once I had her secure, I brought her down to the dog cage.  Then later that day, I was able to catch the last kitten.  The first stage was completed.

Mayonnaise

Nutella

Wishbone

The four kittens were split into two, with Mayonnaise and Nutella staying in my son's room and Snickers and Wishbone staying in my daughter's room, with the doorways to both rooms facing each other.  They were very playful, and it was not uncommon when lying in bed to hear above me what sounded like a cattle stampede as the kittens would chase after each other across the floor.  I decided to keep Cersei penned up in the cage in the basement, as I was worried that if she could interact with the kittens it would prevent them from becoming accustomed to being around people.  Plus, I was worried her behavior would be too unpredictable. She was clearly upset and would often let out sad wailing noises that almost sounded like "Why me?"  Several times I was brave enough to try to pet her through the bars of the cage, well away from her head.  She would freeze up, not offering any resistance, but she was not happy about it either.

The next step was figuring out what to do with all of them.  We decided to keep Snickers, the first kitten we caught.  The friend who loaned me his trap had a sister-in-law who wanted to adopt one of the male kittens, so we gave her Wishbone, who I so named because he had this shape in the fur pattern on his back that reminded me of a wishbone.  My friend also graciously took Cersei to the Town of Oyster Bay animal shelter to get spayed.  I figured I would set her free once she had healed from the operation so that at least she wouldn't be able to get pregnant again and add more cats to the local population.  To my surprise, in asking my colleagues in my office if any of them were interested in adopting a kitten, a friend of one of my coworkers offered to take Cersei instead.  Meanwhile, as my wife, daughter and I had to drive upstate in early July to pick up my son from ice hockey summer camp in Lake Placid, another one of my coworkers offered to have Mayonnaise and Nutella over at her apartment to take care of them while we were gone.  Snickers would be boarded at a vet clinic along with the rabbit and guinea pigs we had at the time.

Since the man who would take Cersei was in Westchester County in upstate New York, we were also going to drop her off on the way up Lake Placid.  We had her in the dog cage while Mayonnaise and Nutella were in a smaller cage next to her in the back of the car.  The drive to my coworker's apartment in Brooklyn was the first time Cersei had seen any of her kittens since we captured her and it would also be the last.  After some interminable traffic delays in Brooklyn, we finally made it up to the man's house in Westchester to drop off Cersei.  To my pleasant surprise, after we returned from vacation, my coworker had become so taken in with Mayonnaise and Nutella that she told me she wanted to keep them.  So, in the space of a week, I had gone from five cats down to one.

Snickers very quickly became a beloved and cherished member of the family.  While cats have a reputation of being aloof, he can be quite friendly when he wants to be.  One habit he adopted was the practice of sitting upright as if he was a human.  I don't know if it is common for cats to do this, or if Snickers was consciously trying to model the way we sit.  He is very vocal and lets us know when he wants something, which usually means giving him his favorite snack, Greenie's Hairball Control treats.  He also has some quirky habits that make him annoyingly endearing, such as when he lays down on a jigsaw puzzle I am working on on the living room floor or chewing on my wife's plants.  I suspect he likes me the most of the four of us, owing to me being the only one who doesn't pick him up and hold him all the time.  I refrain from doing it because I notice he does not seem to like to be held and constrained like that.  He also seems to like hanging around me and if I am sitting in one place for a period of time he will nape on the floor close by.  It didn't take long for me to say that I captured Snickers, and then he captured my heart.  I also felt a sense of pride that I had removed five cats from the local outdoor population, who had they been left to their own devices, could have created countless more litters.  But that didn't mean there were no more cats in the neighborhood.

Gilbert

Not long after we captured Cersei and all of her litter, we spotted a very large cat walking across our deck sometimes at night.  I thought maybe it was the father looking for Cersei.  But it wasn't until the following year that this cat became a more frequent visitor.  It was clearly a different breed of cat from the tabby cat that Cersei, Snickers and his siblings were.  It was almost like a miniature lion and had a very regal bearing.  Apparently he was a Maine Coon Cat.  We called him Gilbert.  He became our outdoor cat.  He would show up, usually at night, to be fed.  While he would keep his distance from us, as he grew more accustomed to us, he would let us get closer to him, though he would never let us pet him.  Sometimes he would come on to our deck during the daytime as well.  After shutting Snickers in my bedroom, I would open our back door and Gilbert would come in and eat from Snickers food bowl and he would linger for a few minutes under the dining room table.  I never tried to capture him like I did with Cersei, as I was concerned that having two male cats in the house would turn my home into a warzone between two territorial males.  Gilbert became such a regular fixture that his absences were noted more than his appearances.  There would be a day or two here or a week or so there where we would not see him, but Gilbert would reliably return.  But in early 2019 his absences became more frequent.  After a longer than usual period of time where he was gone, Gilbert showed up on our deck one evening in May of 2019.  I took a photo of him, posted it on Facebook and captioned it "Gilbert always comes back."  We never saw him again after that night.

Oscar

Right around the time we started to see less of Gilbert, we noticed the bushes in the front of our house smelled strongly of cat pee.  And then we noticed a new cat who we would come to call Oscar.  He looked to be a coon cat like Gilbert, but with radically different coloring.  Maine Coon Cats are noted for having dog-like characteristics, and Oscar certainly fit the bill.  I gather he picked up that Oscar was the name we gave him, as sometimes I would go into the backyard and call out his name, and then he would come running quickly towards me from one or two yards away, and then rub up against my leg.  When I would open the back door to let him come him into our house, he did so not warily like other cats, but rather with an arrogant strut as if he owned the place.  Again, as with Gilbert, I had to keep Snickers shut away during such visits so as to avoid a fight between the two.  I wonder if Oscar drove Gilbert away, as it seemed rather coincidental that the arrival of one followed the disappearance of the other.

The winter of 2020 saw the arrival of two more regular cats, a tuxedo cat I called Bandit owing to the top half of her face being black like a robber's mask while the bottom half of the face was white, and Lilith, another coon cat who bore a stunning resemblance to Gilbert, with the only difference being the fur coloring.  

Lilith

While Bandit disappeared after a couple of weeks (only to resurface again for several weeks last month), Lilith remained a regular fixture for quite some time.  Like Gilbert, she would keep a wary distance, but did not run away when approached.  She also made the same noises as Gilbert, leading to be to wonder if he was either her father or if they were siblings.  I concluded she was a female based on the way Snickers reacts to cats that come to our back door.  When the cat is a male, Snickers becomes agitated and hostile, and he even bit me a couple of times when Gilbert was at the door.  But with Lilith his reaction was more subdued and the sounds he made were different.  I don't recall exactly when, but by late spring or early summer, Lilith stopped coming around.  My wife thought that she might have been pregnant and had babies someplace else.

And then there is Katrina.

In early 2018, we started to get another regular feline visitor.  It was a smaller tabby cat with a white chest who would run across our desk while nervously peering at us.  At first we thought it was a male and called it Milo.  But after capturing it the summer of that year, we discovered it was a female.  So we renamed her Katrina.  The top portion of her left ear was also clipped off, leading me to believe that someone had previously captured her and had her spayed.  We also noticed that Oscar's left ear was similarly clipped.  Maybe because she was older, Katrina never really became accustomed to being a house cat.  She spent most days hiding underneath the love seat in our living room, emerging only to eat and use the litter box.  I actually set her free after two attempts at housing her, the first time because she pooped behind the love seat.  But I didn't want to give up on her and for a third time I was able to entice her into the house and then shut the door behind her.  Katrina ended up living with us for about a year and a half.  She still spent a lot of time hiding from us, but sometimes she would nap out in the open on top of the love seat or even on my bed.  Every now and then I would be lying on my bed with the door open, and Katrina would walk in, sit near the entrance, and make noises at me.  Snickers would rough house with her a lot, but at times he could be affectionate towards her as well.  One time I was sitting on the sofa watching television and Snickers was napping at the other end.  Katrina jumped up onto the sofa and woke up Snickers, who proceeded to start licking her.

In February of 2019, when Gilbert was still a regular visitor, I opened the door and let him in.  Since I wasn't able to pick Katrina up to shut her in my bedroom, I had to take my chances with her.  She went up to Gilbert and they seemed to share some level of affection together.  She went out into the deck with him and then disappeared.  On the previous two times where I drove her out of the house, she was back on our deck within minutes.  This time, she did not come back.  That night was rather unseasonable warm for February, but several nights later it had gotten very cold.  I flipped on the deck lights to see if there was any feline activity and was stunned to see Katrina at the door looking up at me almost pleadingly, as if she realized she had made a big mistake.  I opened the door and put some food nearby to entice her, and after a while she came inside and I shut the door behind her.  She remained with us for almost the remainder of the year, but was able to escape out the back door around Christmas of 2019.  She was not to be seen for weeks, and then in late January my daughter said she would sometimes see her on our front stoop.  Then she began to visit our deck again in February.  She looked to us to feed her but did not seem keen on coming in the house.  However, I noticed that if Snickers was in the dining room, she would want to come in.  So, rather than shutting Snickers away, I let him stay.  I opened the back door and as before had a bowl of food to entice her.  Katrina warily came in after a number of false starts and started to eat, but she looked up at me as I started to close the door.  But this time, Snickers had conveniently placed his body between her and the door so that Katrina could not escape as I closed it.  Katrina was back in the house again, but not for long.  This past May, with the weather warm again, we would slide open the glass back door while keeping the screen door shut.  Snickers though, being the clever cat that he is, learned that he could use his paws to push open the screen door, which enabled Katrina to escape again.  She did not disappear though, returning to our door regularly to be fed, and retreating to hide under our deck if we got too close to her.  I have been able to entice her into our house to play with Snickers a number of times, but she seems wise to my tactics now and all of my further attempts to shut her in have failed.  Katrina seems perfectly content to be our outdoor cat, engaging with us on her own terms while spending her days napping on our deck and her nights sheltering underneath it.  With winter approaching, I may try to make further attempts to capture her again, but only time will tell if I succeed.  

Before the spring of 2016, cats were not a factor in my life.  I never contemplated owning one and barely took note of the cats in our neighborhood.  But ever since that morning when I observed Snickers, his mom and his siblings on our backyard deck, cats have become a permanent fixture in my life.  Barely a day goes by where I am not feeding or taking notice of daily visitors like Katrina and Oscar, or taking note of new cats who appear for a day or a few weeks and then are never seen again.    

Thank God I Didn't Waste My Money on One of These!

For those of us sane Americans, it is astounding the level of cult like devotion that some of our fellow countrymen and women have for Donald Trump.  On Long Island, where I live, the days leading up to the election have seen Trump caravans consisting of cars and trucks festooned with Trump flags driving up and down our major roads.  For me, one of the more ironic manifestations of Trump support are Trump 2020 face masks, given that he consistently downplayed the severity of Coronavirus to the American people and generally eschewed the wearing of masks, only to himself end up being infected with the virus last month.

But one of the more bizarre offerings I have seen from the Trump Cult comes from this brochure that I received in the mail several months ago.  I have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list, but at any rate, I found it so hilarious I decided to hold on to it and revisit it after the election.

The part I find especially funny is the motto "Unbowed, Unbroken, Vindicated" etched into the rifle, as it is a shameless ripoff of the motto of House Martell from Game of Thrones, "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken."

While it is still too soon to call the race, it seems pretty clear that Trump has no chance to achieve the needed 270 Electoral College votes he will need to win.  In fact, it looks to be the reverse of the 2016 race, where he will end up with the 232 that Hillary Clinton got while Joe Biden will end up with the 306 attained by Trump in the previous election.  One wonders if Trump will agree that Biden will have achieved one of the greatest presidential wins ever, considering that Trump's 306 Electoral College votes in 2016 were not accompanied with a win in the popular vote, whereas Biden is currently on track to have approximately 5 million more votes than Trump.  Donald Trump is neither unbowed, unbroken, nor vindicated.

The Forgotten Story of the Canary Islanders

It's the month of October, which means another Columbus Day where we recognize the European discovery of the Americas by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus.  However, for his detractors, Columbus is not a hero, but rather a villain who inaugurated the rape, murder and plunder of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

While Columbus is an easy target on whom to pin the blame for all that followed, what is often overlooked is that his story, though clearly an important one, is just one part of the larger story of the European voyages of discovery that sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean in the 15th century.  When Columbus first encountered the inhabitants of the islands he discovered in late 1492 in what are today the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, the Spanish monarchy in whose service he sailed already had a template for dealing with indigenous peoples that involved subjugation.

After Columbus departed from Palos in Spain on August 3, 1492, he did not immediately sail out into the unknown.  His first destination was the Canary Islands, a chain of seven islands in the Atlantic approximately 100 kilometers west of the Moroccan coastline, where he could take advantage of the trade winds. The Canary Islands were claimed by and in the process of being conquered by the Spanish.  These islands, believed to be the islands referred to in antiquity as the Fortunate Isles, began to be visited by European navigators since the 14th century, who found them to be inhabited by a race of people known to us as the Guanches.

The origin of the Guanches has been the subject of much debate, though the consensus is that they are related to North African Berbers.  Some descriptions of them from the Age of Discovery tell of tall men with blond hair and blue eyes.  It is believed that their presence in the island chain dates to roughly the 5th century BCE, though no one is sure under what circumstances they arrived there. By the time Europeans began to visit the Canaries regularly in the 14th century, they noted that the Guanches did not seem to have any knowledge of seamanship.  If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that a Carthaginian expedition lost to history attempted to colonize the islands and that over time communications with Carthage were cut off and their descendants forgot how to navigate the seas and even how to build ships for sailing between the seven islands.  They must have forgotten a lot of things, as the medieval Europeans found them living at what we would call today a Stone Age level of technology.

Beginning in 1402, the Kingdom of Castile, which by the time of Columbus would be unified by the marriage of its queen Isabella to King Ferdinand of Aragon to form the Kingdom of Spain, began the military conquest of the Canary Islands.  In Rivers Of Gold, Hugh Thomas writes of the Guanches that "They had no horses, and Castilian cavalry terrified them.  They had many languages and were ruled by numerous independent kinglets.  They fought well with stones and sticks, but their numbers were already falling because of contact with European diseases."

As late as Columbus's visit in August of 1492, the Guanches were still holding out in several of the islands, and their conquest was not fully completed until 1496.  From Rivers Of Gold, "The Canary Islands became a source of wealth for Castile.  Numerous Canary Islanders had been kidnapped since the 1450s and sold as slaves in Andalusia."  Sugar mills were established on the island, and of course missionaries sent to convert the natives to Christianity.  Over time, the Guanches ceased to exist as a distinct people, though today there are still people who are descended from Guanches ancestors who intermarried with Europeans.

When we look in horror today at the destruction the Spanish perpetrated in the Americas during the age of the Conquistadors, it is clear that what happened was not an aberration nor policies that were made up on the fly, but rather was a continuation of what they had already been doing in the Canary Islands over the course of the previous hundred years.