The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Anonymous Official: We May Never Know Who Had Cocaine at the White House

Posted on | July 5, 2023 | 1 Comment

‘Round up the usual suspects’

Politico gets the “inside” source:

Law enforcement officials confirmed on Wednesday that cocaine was found at the White House over the weekend.
But one official familiar with the investigation . . .

(Who may be Merrick Garland, or maybe not. Who knows?)

. . . cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely to be determined given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing.

(When a Democrat’s in the White House, everybody’s on dope.)

The small amount of cocaine was found in a cubby area for storing electronics within the West Exec basement entryway into the West Wing, where many people have authorized access, including staff or visitors coming in for West Wing tours.

(Oh, great — let’s blame the tourists!)

Asked what the chances were of finding the culprit, the official said that “it’s gonna be very difficult for us to do that because of where it was.”

(Notice the use of “us” here, indicating that this official is part of the investigation. And by “investigation,” of course I mean cover-up.)

“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught” by the cameras, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given that it’s an ongoing investigation. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”

As to whether Hunter Biden ever used this entrance, well, for some reason that Politico reporter didn’t think of asking the “official familiar with the investigation” about The World’s Most Famous Cocaine Addict.

These people aren’t doing any actual journalism. It’s all just stenography for the Democratic National Committee.



 

 

Category: Media Bias

An Alaska Fourth of July Tradition

Posted on | July 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON
“What do you mean, no fireworks?”

It was then explained to me that, because it never gets fully dark in Alaska during the Midnight Sun season, a fireworks display is impractical. What do Alaskans do for the Fourth of July?

They go to Glacier View — about 100 miles northeast of Anchorage, up the Matanuska River valley — for the annual Car Launch.

 

Old vehicles are rolled down a hill and off a cliff for the entertainment of a crowd of thousands. They’ve been doing this since 2005, and it’s become like race day at Talladega, an all-day redneck festival — Alabama in Alaska, essentially. Looks like fun. We’re going.



 

 

Category: Alaska

In The Mailbox: 07.03.23

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.03.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, it’ll be a lot shorter, because Feedly is acting up. To fill the time that you otherwise would have spent on those blogs, go read The Killer Angels, This Hallowed Ground, Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg, or Forstchen & Gingrich’s alt-history Gettysburg, the first part of a trilogy that shows how Lee could have won the battle – and lost the war a lot sooner. 
Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: How Movies Make Money, Or Don’t, As The Case May Be
Twitchy: The National Speech & Debate Association Has Gone Woke – Tolerates Open Discrimination, Mehdi Hasan Doesn’t Understand – The Children Yearn For The Mines, and The Homeless Are Flushed Out Of Public Toilets In Gov. Hairgel’s California
Stoic Observations: Welcome To My Worldview
Gab News: Twitter’s Extreme Position Destroys The Open Web
CDR Salamander: Have Yourself A Very Nimitz July 4th
Don Surber: The Bioweapon That Elected Biden

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Democrats Kill Each Other in Baltimore; Mayor Blames … Texas, Florida, Alabama?

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | 1 Comment

In 2020, Brandon Scott was elected mayor of Baltimore with more than 70% of the vote in a city whose per-capita violent crime rate (2,027 per 100,000 residents) is nearly twice as high as Chicago (1,099). There’s no sign that this carnage will abate anytime soon:

Investigators in Baltimore are searching for multiple suspects in a mass shooting that turned a beloved annual neighborhood block party into chaos early Sunday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, most of whom were teens, officials said.
The search for the shooters – investigators believe at least two were involved in the incident – is ongoing, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN Monday, vowing, “We will not rest until we find those who cowardly decided to shoot up this block party and carry out acts of violence which we know will be illegal guns.” . . .
The gunfire erupted early Sunday in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where community members were enjoying a yearly celebration dubbed Brooklyn Day.
Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18 . . . and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, were fatally shot, the Baltimore Police Department announced.
The dozens of surviving victims all sustained gunshot wounds, according to acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley. Five of those injured were adults aged 20 or older and the remaining 23 were teenagers ranging in age from 13 to 19, police said.
Seven of the wounded remain in hospitals, with four in critical condition and three in stable condition, the mayor noted.
Investigators are scouring the sprawling crime scene – which spans several blocks – for evidence and are poring over hours of surveillance footage, the police commissioner said. Officials have also urged community members to come forward with any relevant information or video footage that may assist in the investigation.
A reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects has been raised to $28,000, Worley said at a news conference Monday.

While police have provided no description of the shooters, my hunch is that they’re probably not Trump supporters, IYKWIMAITYD. But this didn’t stop the mayor from trying to shift the blame:

“Mayor Scott, you said this year alone Baltimore PD confiscated 1,300 illegal weapons. Do you have a sense of where guns are coming from, the sort of illegal supply of guns are coming from into the city?” CNN anchor Audie Cornish asked.
“These guns come into Maryland – I want to be very clear about this – because Maryland has gun laws that actually have an impact. We have a ghost gun ban, which is why you see those numbers coming down. But these weapons come from Virginia. They come from Texas. They come from Florida. They come from Alabama. They come from everywhere in this country,” the mayor replied, blaming guns and not thugs for the carnage.
“Here we are dozens of years later, decades later at this point and we’re still dealing with mass shootings because of the inaction to deal with this issue on a national level. This can no longer be an issue that falls to the feet of local police, local elected officials or state governments,” Scott continued, seeming to suggest a larger crackdown on firearms on a national level is needed.

It’s not the people of Baltimore — the ones who elected Brandon Scott as their mayor — who are to blame, it’s those out-of-state guns! See, the citizens of Baltimore are all innocent angels, and their city would be a peaceful utopia, were it not for those bad people in other states — Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama — who refuse to “deal with this issue on a national level.” The CNN audience actually believes this absurd excuse, because their entire worldview would collapse if they ever stopped to think that perhaps the kind of people who vote for Democrats are anything other than virtuous. No CNN viewer would ever consider the possibility that the citizens of Baltimore are less virtuous than the people of Florida, who reelected Gov. Ron DeSantis in a landslide.



 

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Maryland

The Consequences of Demonic Influence

Posted on | July 3, 2023 | Comments Off on The Consequences of Demonic Influence

The Huffington Post unloaded an 8,000-word feature about a transgender person calling herself/“himself” Renton Sinclair. Perhaps your first reaction to this is to ask, “The Huffington Post still exists?” Yeah, I was surprised, too. In 2011, Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for $315 million. In 2015, Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL. then in 2021, Verizon sold HuffPo to BuzzFeed in a stock swap whose value could most likely be described as “pennies on the dollar” of what Huffington sold it for 10 years earlier. BuzzFeed immediately started cutting HuffPo staff.

So much for the story of the dwindling footprint of HuffPo. As for this exhaustingly long feature about Renton Sinclair, why? What was the journalistic objective of HuffPo senior reporter Christopher Mathias in spending so much time telling Renton’s story? The idea seems to be to present this person as the sympathetic “poster boy” victimized by a “right-wing culture war,” as Mathias describes the backlash against the Transgender Cult. Sinclair is the daughter of Tania Joy Gibson, who has become an outspoken opponent of transgenderism, and Mathias portrays Gibson as a “Crazy Church Lady” type, associated with “a coalition of Christian dominionists determined to reshape America according to a far-right, fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.”

A major “hook” for this story — the selling point of the narrative — is that Gibson is a former beauty pageant winner, who competed as Miss Illinois in the 1996 Miss America contest. And one could imagine how, perhaps, being the daughter of a former beauty queen might present difficulties, pressure to follow in mommy’s footsteps, to live up to a certain ideal or whatever. So this information may be relevant as an explanatory factor in Renton Sinclair’s gender identity issues. However, the more obvious and mundane explanations are impossible to overlook:

Renton was 8 when his parents divorced, and he struggled with depression thereafter. His mom sent him to therapy and put him on meds, but nothing seemed to help ease a profound despair and anxiety that had grown inside him, feelings he could never quite identify the origins of and which intensified with puberty. “A lot of it was just internally like feeling terrible about myself and just not really knowing why,” he recalls.
He didn’t have much of a frame of reference for being queer — save for a couple of gay men he saw serving on pageant boards with his mom — but he suspected he probably was. “What’s worse is my whole sexuality issue,” he wrote in his journal once. “I can’t decide if I’m homo or bi.”
Then, when he was about 12, one of Renton’s favorite YouTubers, an anime cosplayer named twinfools, posted a video announcing that he was transgender. . . .
Renton found refuge in an online network of queer youth on sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt. He started going by the name Axel with this online coterie — a name adapted from a male character in the video game “Kingdom Hearts” — and eventually set up a secret Facebook account where he could try on this new identity.
He and his new friends confided in each other and talked about being queer. At one point, Renton felt comfortable enough offline to come out to some friends at a Bible camp in Wisconsin. “I told two friends about my LGBT stuff,” he wrote in his journal.
But the depression only deepened. On Dec. 22, 2011, Renton tried to kill himself by overdosing on Tylenol.

This tale — family problems, mental health issues, social-media influence — is so familiar as to be stereotypical of transgender teens in the 21st century. A depressed girl with divorced parents and sexuality issues, addicted to YouTube and Tumblr, creating a fake male online persona named for a character in a video game and pretending to be a boy on Facebook? It’s a cliché. Remember all those crazy SJW Tumblrina feminists I used to make fun of? Practically all of them were “queer” in one way or another, and universally they listed their mental illnesses — bipolar, PTSD, whatever — in their Tumblr profiles.

Adolescence is always an emotionally turbulent time, and everybody has to find some way of coping with the stresses involved. Smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin were among the most popular coping mechanisms when I was a teenager. Nowadays, getting lost in online media — video games, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. — seems to have replaced nodding off to “Kashmir” in a haze of marijuana fumes as the popular teenage habit, and I’m far from certain it’s an improvement.

But what about the influence of . . . Satan?

In the HuffPo article, Mathias makes a point of treating Tania Joy Gibson’s religious beliefs and practices as self-evidently absurd, e.g., when she puts her daughter into psychiatric treatment:

Renton says his mom and stepdad had discovered he’d been cutting himself. Moreover, his stepdad had gone on Renton’s computer and found the “Axel” Facebook account. He and Tania read through his messages about being queer.
“They freaked the fuck out,” Renton recalls. . . .
One day they told Renton they needed to stop by the hospital so Tania could get a blood test. But while waiting in the lobby, it became clear to Renton that it was a ruse: “I saw a sign saying ‘adolescent inpatient psychiatric’ or some shit, and I was just like, ‘God damn it, here we fucking go.’”
Renton says they kept him there for a week. Sometimes Tania visited with a pastor, the pair loudly praying over Renton in the visitor’s room and speaking in tongues — the practice, popular in certain charismatic evangelical churches, of harnessing a supernatural ability to speak in an unknown, divine language. (To nonbelievers, however, it can sound like gibberish.)
Tania would also bring Christian counselors for therapy sessions, Renton says, during which they’d sit in a room reading Bible verses and telling Renton that being queer was wrong. It was only years later that he realized this was conversion therapy.
“I don’t think the goal was necessarily to make people straight or whatever as much as it was just to, like, repress you to the point where you either just die or you just stop arguing with it,” Renton remembers.
Renton eventually was allowed to spend nights at home, but he claims he spent daytime hours when he should have been at school at the psychiatric facility. He was still forbidden from seeing friends, even the kids next door. Renton remembers his grandmother, Tania’s mom, telling him over and over that there was a war over his soul between angels and demons.

Consider this possibility: GRANDMA WAS RIGHT!

The phenomenon of “cutting” (self-harm) immediately calls to mind the Gadarene demoniac who spent his time “in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” When Jesus confronted the “unclean spirit” that had possessed the man and asked the demon’s name, the reply was: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” And then Jesus sent the demonic spirit (or spirits) into a herd of pigs, “and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea” (Mark 5:1-20).

Maybe you don’t believe that, but for those of us who do, there are several lessons that can be learned from studying this Bible passage, including the fact that Satan’s influence is destructive, which is why the victim of demonic possession engages in self-destructive behavior.

That Renton’s grandma would see her behavior as evidence of spiritual warfare is only controversial to non-believers. Most Christians aren’t into that charismatic speaking-in-tongues kind of thing, but anyone who views the Bible as the Word of God must acknowledge that demonic possession is a real thing. You can see evidence of it lots of places, if you know what you’re looking for (e.g., “‘Feminist Witchcraft,’ Mental Illness and the Demonic Dangers of the Occult,” Feb. 21, 2017). Some years ago, I read An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels by Father Gabriele Amorth, who was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist, and offers this explanation (pp. 72-73):

Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.

See, it’s not just me pointing out this connection. However, in an age of spiritual ignorance, most people are not cognizant of the dangers of demonic influences, and tend to ridicule anyone who takes such dangers seriously when discussing, for example, Ellen “Elliot” Page.

“Symptomatic evidence of demonic possession,” I called it, and I suppose most readers took this as merely more of my habitual sarcasm, but was I really just joking? When people engage in self-destructive behavior and claim to be hearing voices, whose voice are they hearing?

So HuffPo spent 8,000 words celebrating Renton Sinclair as a victim of “right-wing” Christianity, when I think it far more likely that she/“he” is a victim of Satanic forces which are everywhere in this dark age.



 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

Rule 5 Sunday: Elisabeth Giolito

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Instagram model Elisabeth (Lis) Giolito was born on May 26 1996, (which would make her 27) and also does professional modeling through Tricia Brink Management.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Leftists In America Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, MAGA – The Part Of Lavrenti Beria is Played By Jack Smith, Indiana Jones & The Destruction Of Destiny, Jack Ryan (Final Season),  Blade Runner 1929, “Queen Victoria”, A Cholesterol-Lowering Alternative To Statins? and Asteroid City

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Ashley Kolfage, Fish Pic Friday – Alesia Halliday, Thursday Tanlines, Gone Fishin’, The Wednesday Wetness, Is Garland Impeachment Coming?, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, So Who’s Telling the Truth, the Whistleblower or AG Garland? and Palm Sunday

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. for June 30

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

We Survived Thunder Bird Falls

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | Comments Off on We Survived Thunder Bird Falls

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON
When my son told us we were going for a hike Saturday, my first thought was, “We’re going to get eaten by bears.” A quick Google search (“thunder bird falls + grizzly bear”) turned up several results, including a recent story with this quote:

“Bear encounters can happen anywhere in Anchorage, in Alaska,” Fish and Game Assistant Area Biologist Cory Stantorf said. “So regardless of where you’re at, whether it’s a viewing deck or the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge, Kincaid, you always have to be prepared and ready for an encounter with wildlife, whether it’s bear, moose, wolves.”

And then there was this headline from 2005:

“Nothing to worry about,” said my son, as he loaded his .44 revolver and packed it into the holster strapped to his chest. “Just in case.”

By the way, notice how the Fish and Game biologist spoke of “bear encounters,” rather than “bear attacks.” Political correctness run amok. I expect this kind of euphemism from Democrats in Philadelphia (“Carjacking encounters can happen anywhere”) but this is Alaska, OK? We’re talking the Final Frontier, pioneers in the wilderness. When I “encounter” a gigantic omnivorous wild beast with fangs and claws, this is a bear attack, I don’t care what you call it. Anyway . . .

We headed up the highway to Thunder Bird Falls, which is in Chugach State Park. An interesting Alaska cultural note: “Chugach” is a compound word, from the native chu (“eaten by”) and gach (“bears”).

On our way to adventure.

A helpful map near the park entrance, showing visitors where they can get eaten by grizzly bears (i.e., everywhere)

Thunder Bird Falls is on the Eklutna River, which is less than 12 miles long, tumbling down from the top of a mountain to the Cook Inlet in the Gulf of Alaska. The inlet is named for 18th-century British explorer Captain James Cook, who sailed into the inlet seeking the fabled Northwest Passage. Given the trend whereby Mount McKinley has been renamed “Denali” (because that’s what the natives allegedly called it), it’s probably only a matter of time before Cook Inlet gets renamed, because you can’t name stuff after white guys anymore. Meanwhile . . .

Another interesting Alaska cultural fact: Eklutna is also a compound word, from the native eklu (“food for”) and utna (“grizzly bears”).

If you’re getting tired of my dark sarcasm, imagine how my wife felt as I was cracking these jokes all the way to the park. Facing danger with a smile on your face — that’s just the way I roll. And because of my habitual sarcasm, you may think I was joking when I talked about my son strapping a .44 to his chest before we left the house.

See the revolver handle sticking out of the holster? In addition to being a Ranger-qualified Army Airborne sergeant first class, my son is also a serious hunting enthusiast, who is currently planning bow-hunting expeditions for mountain sheep (aoudad) this fall. On our trip to Thunder Bird Falls, he was telling me something about the state game laws that protect the bears, and I was thinking, “Shouldn’t the laws be about protecting people?” Fortunately, there is a loophole in the laws, so that it’s not illegal to kill a bear in self-defense, but because this is 2023, I’m sure some environmentalist version of Ben Crump would show up to lead a protest claiming the bear was an honor student who was just minding his own business when you killed it: “No justice! No peace!”

Anyway, my son had a pistol strapped to his chest, and a two-month-old baby girl strapped to his back, because he’s a badass that way.

Grandma and Eliza: Smile and say, ‘Bears!’

So now we had the family ready for the hike up the trail, and if I was (mostly) joking about the danger of a “bear encounter,” soon I encountered something perfectly calculated to inspire fear.

OH MY DEAR GOD! While I’d been clowning around about the prospect of being eaten by grizzly bears, it hadn’t occurred to me that this trail followed the edge of a deep mountain gorge. Exactly how high was that “STEEP CLIFF” the sign was warning me about? I don’t know, because I’m so afraid of heights I didn’t dare get close enough to look.

It’s weird how my acrophobia is selective. Like, I’m not afraid of every high-altitude situation. We’d flown over 3,000 miles to get to Alaska, and that didn’t scare me at all. And when I was a kid, it was nothing to climb way up in the biggest poplar tree in the neighbor’s yard. But put me on the edge of a precipice — no, I can’t stand that. It terrifies me. Any action-adventure film where the hero is dangling off the side of a skyscraper? Nope. Never see those scenes. Got my eyes closed.

That first sign, warning me how close I was to the “STEEP CLIFF” — plummeting hundreds of feet to my death — caused me to notice how narrow the trail was, and how crowded it was with tourists who seemed utterly heedless of their proximity to “DANGER.”

When I’d started out up the trail, my main concern was about the my-thighs-are-getting-sore steepness of the climb. Once I realized there was a “STEEP CLIFF” just a few feet to my left, however, my concern shifted to the fact that there were whole families of tourists, some of them with dogs on leashes, carelessly loping up and down this trail with utter disregard of the “DANGER” nearby. And the trail was barely wide enough for three people to walk side-by-side safely, so that when I’d see a cluster of tourists approaching, I’d get wwaaaayy over to the right side of the trail to let them pass. And, every 40 or 50 yards up the trail, there’d be another one of those signs: “DANGER! STEEP CLIFF! STAY ON TRAIL!” And I’d be muttering, “Yeah, you didn’t have to tell me twice.”

About a half-mile up the trail, we reached the “Gorge Overlook.”

Family members foolishly risk their lives.

It must be explained that I also have vicarious acrophobia — it’s not just that I’m afraid of heights, but I also get freaked out by seeing other people near the edge of a precipice, especially my kids. Like, when the boys were little, we’d hike up to Black Rock, and I’d be a bundle of nerves whenever they’d go to the edge of those cliffs. While I could control my own risk — I ain’t going anywhere near the edge, if I can help it — the children were beyond my control, and I was deathly afraid of them falling off. Wonderful irony that my son should have become a paratrooper, but “out of sight, out of mind.” I can ignore Bob’s death-defying career choices, because I don’t have to see it, and am therefore capable of blocking it out of my consciousness. Meanwhile . . .

Staying far away from danger

While everybody else was RISKING THEIR LIVES at the “Gorge Overlook,” I was on the other side of the trail, chilling out — and by “chilling out,” of course I mean, avoiding psychiatric trauma.

Should I mention that I dislike the word “acrophobia”? Because a “phobia” is an irrational fear, whereas being 300 feet above a river gorge is a real danger, and therefore my fear is perfectly rational. The crazy people are the ones who can stare down at the bottom of that cliff and not freak out, but the psychiatric community doesn’t have a word for that.

My daughter-in-law laughs at the danger

See what I mean? She’s standing next to a sign that clearly says “DANGER,” and she’s laughing at my (entirely rational) fear.

It’s Alaska. It’s about survival on the frontier — basically living inside a Jack London novel, and I’m pretty sure his protagonists never took any unnecessary risks, simply because life was so difficult they didn’t have time for cheap thrills. But nonetheless, we continued hiking up to the “Falls Overlook,” with me trailing behind so that I could navigate around the clusters of dumbass tourists who kept coming down the trail with no apparent concern about the “STEEP CLIFF” on one side.

As we approached the overlook, the path turned into a sort of wooden deck, with rails on either side. DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN! We were literally suspended over the side of the cliff by some kind of jerry-rigged cantilever construction that I’m certain would not pass a safety inspection in any of the Lower 48 states. The headlines were easy to imagine:

JOURNALIST KILLED WHEN OBESE TOURIST
CAUSES OVERLOOK WALKWAY COLLAPSE

Even if I’m not as skinny as I used to be, still I’m easily 100 pounds lighter than some of the tourists who were clomping around up there.

So the family went ahead of me to the overlook, while I hung back waiting for the crowd to clear out. Because if I’m going onto an overlook deck, I’m sure as hell not going onto it while it’s occupied by:

  • 7 or 8 fat tourists;
  • 5 or 6 of their clumsy low-IQ children;
    and
  • 3 or 4 dogs.

What is it with people taking their dogs everywhere they go? Like, it’s important for your dogs to have the cultural enrichment of travel? Perhaps most people don’t think about this, and maybe my misanthropic streak was aggravated by the circumstances, but COULD YOU IDIOTS PLEASE LEAVE YOUR DOGS HOME when I’m trying to walk a trail marked with “DANGER STEEP CLIFF” signs every 50 yards?

Finally, the crowd thinned out enough, and I was ready.

Smile for the camera!

You may notice in that picture that my left hand is very firmly gripped on the rail, because I’m surviving, like a Jack London hero. Also notice that I’m wearing red sneakers. Those aren’t my sneakers. I’d expected to wear my normal street shoes — tasseled loafers — for this hike, but my son insisted on lending me a pair of his sneakers, and boy, I’m glad he did. As bad as it was going up that “DANGER STEEP CLIFFS” trail, it would have been a thousand times worse if I’d been wearing slick-soled loafers instead of those sneakers. Grateful for every small advantage.

My son’s family.

Despite my advanced age, I out-hiked everybody on the way back down the mountain. It wasn’t even close. Smile for the camera — snap! — and then I set off at a blistering pace, because the faster I went, the sooner I’d be away from “DANGER STEEP CLIFFS.” By the time the rest of the family got to the bottom of the trail, I’d been sitting there 15 minutes, smoking a cigarette, smiling like the hero of a Jack London novel.

 

Throwing in The Big Yellow Button here because I hope you’re enjoying this tale of my Alaska adventures enough to hit the freaking tip jar. And don’t worry about the IRS, because of course, I’ve got plenty of tax-deductible business expenses from this trip. This is one of the beauties of being a Professional Journalist™ in America — anything becomes a “business expense” if you write about it. You write about travel? Tax-deductible business expense. You write about food?

Having survived the trip to Thunder Bird Falls, and to celebrate not getting eaten by bears or falling off a cliff, we headed up to Palmer, where we dined at La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant. This was the occasion of even more of my habitual sarcasm, because who else would travel to the arctic wilderness to eat Mexican food? And as we were heading up there, I already knew what I was going to order, because the menu in every Mexican restaurant has it — the #1 Combination Plate, with a beef taco, chicken enchilada, rice and beans. There is nothing more predictable than the #1 Combination Plate, which is why I always order it. And, wearing my Professional Journalist™ hat as a food critic, I can tell you that La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant serves excellent food in large portions. My wife ordered the vegetarian burrito and it was ENORMOUS! As soon as they brought it out, I was like, “Just go ahead and bring us a take-out box, because there’s no way she’s going to eat that whole thing.”

After dinner, we did a bit of sightseeing in downtown Palmer — the view of the mountains is breathtaking — then went for ice cream at The Big Dipper, which is also excellent, the Professional Journalist™ said.

Having survived the wilderness — in a thrilling Jack London way — I took a long nap when we got back, and now, after 2,000 words, I must remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Category: Alabama, Shoe Leather Fund

Just a Bear Walking Down the Street

Posted on | July 2, 2023 | Comments Off on Just a Bear Walking Down the Street

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska
After an exciting day when we visited Thunder Bird Falls and had dinner in Palmer, I went immediately to bed, about 7 p.m. local time Saturday. Around midnight, my wife woke me up to show me the video she had captured of a bear walking around outside our son’s house. I tried to get back to sleep, but about 1:30 a.m., gave up and came downstairs, intending to write up our Saturday activities. So I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and when I glanced up from my phone — there it was!



 

 

Category: Alaska
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