Remembering 9/11

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I climbed into my favorite Piper Cub -- built in 1946 but kitted out as a WW2 artillery spotter with extra-large windows -- and few northwest on a GPS line toward the little airport where I planned to top off the gas tank for my annual flight around the White Mountains. It was one of those golden days that reward us for having the fortitude to live in New Hampshire.

I was considering a touch-and-go at Wolfeboro, where I'd graduated from high school in 1950, when the little radio in my breast pocket chirped to life: a pilot across the state line in Maine was ready for takeoff. Somebody told him to abort. "I'm already off the ground," he said. "Well, turn back," said the other voice. "There's a national emergency and the airspace is closed."

There being no fuel pump at Wolfeboro, I decided to keep quiet and fly on to Moultonboro. (The Piper Cub was designed before electrics were standard, so my portable radio and plump green earphones were entirely optional.) I landed, gassed up, and secured the Cub to a fence, whereupon a golf cart drove up and I learned that "a 707" had crashed into a skyscraper in New York City, and American airspace was indeed closed until further notice.

Well, the Cub and I did in time get home, and on every 9/11 thereafter until I grounded myself at 80, I flew around the mountains, surfing over the height-of-land on the Kancamagus Highway while raising my middle finger to Osama bin Laden. To the best of my recollection, every one of those days was golden too, as indeed seems to be the case today.

A block of ice in Kyiv

"After the initial invasion [of Ukraine in 2022], a military operation that uses music, painting, and sculpture for "cognitive defense" put a life-sized iron heart in downtown Kyiv. The heart was cut out of a rusting steel plate and encased in a block of ice. Since it was winter, the ice would not melt on its own; only human hands could do that. People gathered around and put their hands on it for as long as they could stand and, person by person, day by day, the Ukrainian people melted the block of ice. I'm not a military man, but I would say that any country capable of thinking like that will be a tough country to defeat." -- Sebastian Junger on Substack

Get your one-dollar coin here, just $1.55!

(Plus shipping, of course...)

Donald Trump glories in breaking norms, most recently the norm that American coins don't show the face of an individual who's still alive. There's another that a dollar should buy a dollar's worth of something or other, though that's a norm that's probably been violated by every president. But the gold-colored President Trump coin can't do that, since it sells for $154.50 per hundred-coin bag, plus $12.95 for standard shipping. That works out to $1.67 each, meaning you experience the inflation of Trump's, Biden's, and Obama's presidencies, plus some of Duba's, all in a single purchase. And if instead you frame the Donbuck and hang it on the wall, it will continue to lose value with every passing year.

A win for Orange Man

A tip of the virtual hat to President Trump for his NASCAR race in Washington DC the other day. Some money was spent, but nobody was hurt, and more than a quarter-million people were entertained at no cost to themselves other than getting there. 250 miles of triple-digit speeds in honor of American's 250th birthday! There have been worse days in the 21st century so far.

(If it wasn't NASCAR, forgive me. I'm not much into auto racing myself.)

Book burners, from Hitler to Putin

Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Emily Hamilton has a new word for Russia's attempt, now in its fifth year, to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainian culture: Bibliocide, the planned, systematic destruction of books. "It is," Ms Hamilton writes, "a common tactic of totalitarians and terrorists."

Like so many of Vladimir Putin's crimes in Ukraine, his inspiration was Adolf Hitler. In Germany, the effort began in April 1933, with the first books condemned to the flames being those of a Jewish scholar at the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin. From there it expanded to 4,000 titles and tens of thousands of copies of works by Marx and Engels, H G Wells, Felix Mendelssohn, Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Helen Keller, and of course Lenin and Trotsky.

Bibliocide was similarly practiced by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo, and ISIS in Iraq.

In Ukraine, Putin has damaged or destroyed 906 libraries since the full-scale invasion of February 2022. In the town of Kapytolivka, when the librarian returned after it was liberated, she counted 4500 books remaining from her collection of 16,500. A particular target of the Russians were books on Ukrainian history and culture, which she found piled in the toilets, smeared with human excrement.

Murdered by Vladimir Putin

The Voronov family in the village of Radushne, in the south of Ukraine, was hit by a Russian missile on Thursday. Ten bodies have been found, and six of them identified, while work continues to excavate the wreckage of their home.

Anthony Fauci takes the Fifth

"Taking the Fifth" was a common phrase in the 1950s, when Mafia thugs were forced to testify before the US Senate's committee to investigate organized crime. Today we're hearing the same dodge from no less an eminence than Anthony Fauci, who in 2020 was "the man of science" who had me wearing a face mask in the ski lodge and my grandchildren going to class on Zoom -- for our own good, of course, and the good of the nation. I didn't mind, really, and it came with one advantage: I never got a cold during the Covid years.

On his way out the door, President Biden gave Fauci a blanket pardon like that given to his son Hunter, valid for any offense up to that time. But "upon the advice of [legal] counsel," Fauci apparently fears criminal liability if he lied to Congress, so he wants to refuse to answer questions posed to him by Senator Ted Cruz, using the protection afforded by the Fifth Amendment to the US Consitution. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be cross-examined by the senator, either, but on the other hand I've never been persuaded by the Wuhan "wet market" theory that Covid was spread naturally from bats to humans, a theory that Fauci and others promoted while heaping scorn on those who suspected that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Tell us the truth, Mr Fauci, or go to jail for contempt of Congress. Or lie, if you prefer, and take your chances on that.

Russia's war on Ukraine heats up

Messrs Putin and Zelensky are really pounding one another, with Russia getting the worst of it. Yesterday, Ukraine launched hundreds of explosive drones against Moscow, hitting targets ranging from an oil depot to the warehouse of an online retailer, Russia's paltry version of Amazon. Also hit: a Tupelov Tu-95 strategic bomber, the Soviet Union's equivalent to our B-52 Stratofortress; twelve ships in the Black Sea, including an oil tanker; and a railroad station and other targets in Russian-occupied Crimea.

Meanwhile, our mercurial president has promised to let Ukraine manufacture the Patriot interceptors it needs to stop Russia's ballistic missiles, which Ukraine is just about out of, and which Lockheed Martin can build only at a snail's pace. Lockeed hopes to reach 550 Patriots a year in a new plant "by 2027." That's just half the number we burned up in 39 days against Iran this spring.

Well, given Kyiv's incredible ability to innovate, maybe by next year we can import what we need from Ukraine!