Some context for the time-line when the Pledge of Allegiance was popularlized

 

The Pledge of Allegiance was first popularized when it was published in The Youth's Companion magazine in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus (re)discovering America. Peak percentage of foreign-born population occurred around 1890.

The Pledge of Allegiance came out at a time in the middle of a period when the United States was absorbing a large number of non-Anglo Saxon, non-Protestant immigrants. They were also immigrating from regions that were not Constitutional Republics.

The floodgates opened during the Great Irish Potato Famine and didn't slow down until 1930. From the perspective of a Native, 13 Colonies descendant, the stream of newcomers became increasingly exotic; from the Catholic Irish with the weird cadence of speaking English to the Germans (still Saxons but not English speakers) to the "Hunkies" and "Wops".

For the record, my paternal grandmother was born in 1903 and spoke German at home. The first words of English she heard was when she went to school at age 5. Needless to say, she had a rough time during WWI when she was 14-15 and anti-German sentiment was rampant. 

A time-line 

1850 to 1880 

Germany (Monarchy form of government) and Ireland (Constitutional Monarchy) were the largest immigrant origin countries in most states and territories. In 1860, Ireland was the largest origin country in 22 of the nation’s 39 states and territories.

By 1880, Germany was the largest origin country in 16 states and territories. Chinese immigrants (Imperial Monarchy) were the largest group in California, Nevada, Oregon, and the Idaho and Washington territories. Mexicans (Authoritarian Republic) were the largest group in Texas and the New Mexico and Arizona territories.

1890-1919

The next wave of immigration to the U.S. lasted from 1890 to 1919, when more than 18 million immigrants arrived. By then, over 60% came from Eastern (Constitutional Monarchies and Absolute Monarchy) and Southern Europe, with large numbers arriving from Italy(Constitutional Monarchy), Austria-Hungary(Constitutional Monarchy), Russia (Absolute Monarchy) and Poland (did not exist as a country but was ruled by Russia and Austria-Hungary and Germany).   Source

That warm, fuzzy feeling that goes with the word "Collectivism"

If you were to be so bold as to point out to a socialist that "collectivism" has a poor historical record, you are likely to get the response "That was then. This is now. Its different now" or "It hasn't been tried here".

Those are testable assertions.

Home Owners Associations

Home Owners Associations have don't have outright abolition of private property. They still let you pay the full mortgage payment AND HOA fees to boot.

However, they often severely curtail what I think of as private property rights. Want to plant a fruit tree in your front yard? Gotta get permission. Want to mow your own lawn? Gotta get permission. Want to opt out of the cost of the decorative, new street lamps? Ain't gonna happen.

There are few social constructs more hated than HOAs. If you hate living in an HOA then you are going to loath socialism.

The Florida Condominium Crisis

The 12 story Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed in June of 2021 and 98 people died.

Investigations into the structural failure revealed that the primary cause was corrosion of the steel rebar in the concrete that had been exacerbated by leakage from the swimming pool. The corrosion caused the diameter of the rebar to increase which shattered the concrete it was embedded in.

Investigation of similar structures in Florida revealed that the problem was systemic and all condominiums with above-ground swimming pools showed similar degradation to the reinforced concrete pillars supporting the building. They are all ticking time-bombs.

Remediation is extremely expensive (vacate underground parking, jack up building, demo rotten concrete and rusted structural steel, replace with new). The condominium assessment for the "fix" will likely exceed the market value of the unit. 

Owners stopped making payments and allowing the properties revert back to the banks they had borrowed the mortgage from. The multi-unit, beachfront condo market in Florida is in free-fall.

Socialism (socially owned property) has a poor record of maintenance of long-term assets. Look at Venezuela's oil infrastructure...it was in total free-fall under Chávez and Maduro. 

Grab bag

I bit the bullet and bought a new laser copier/scanner/fax machine today. The move to Windows 11 computers meant that the computers with the drivers for that model of printer were on the mothballed Windows 10 computers. It still functions as a "dumb" copier but we lost the scan/fax functionality and the "drivers" for that model of printer are no longer available.

Bummer!

Little trees vs big trees

Southern Belle wants some evergreens planted for a windbreak. I provided samples of species that have done well in our climate and SB and Handsome Hombre chose Eastern White Pine and Concolor Fir. Norway Spruce and Douglass Fir did not make the cut.

They have about 300 feet perimeter where they want to wrap the windbreak around the yard. At 6' between trees, that is fifty trees.

Young seedlings cost in the neighborhood of $1.25-to-$4.00 a stem for bare-root stock.

4' tall seedlings in containers run closer to $40 per stem. 

The total cost of the plants for the project will be somewhere between $60 and $2000.

Time or money. That is the trade-off. I am not even sure that they will lose that much time but the larger trees will definitely create a greater visual barrier early on even if the smaller ones catch up with them on year 10 or 15.

Ear infections

I haven't had one in more than twenty years. Then I got one around Christmas and went to the Doc-n-a-Box on December 26. I was prescribed an antibiotic.

The infection went away.

Two weeks later, I had a relapse in the same ear. I went to my family doctor and was prescribed a different antibiotic and ear drops with steroids in them.

So, if I seem to be a little bit scattered and slow to respond, it is because I am not operating at 100%. 

Pledge of Allegiance 

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Those of us who grew up reciting this every day at the start of the school day knew that the United States was not a democracy. We knew it was a Republic and we knew what that meant.

We also believed that there was not a separate set of expectations for city kids vs country kids. It was one nation under one Constitution and while the wording of the laws might vary from state-to-state they still had to comply with the Constitution.

We also believed, naively in retrospect, that every citizen had God-given freedoms and liberty and that we were afforded due-process when accused and that criminals would be duly convicted and be sentenced to a proportional consequence.

What was not made clear to me when I was in second grade was the significance of flags.

Flags were the command-and-control technology on the battlefield before there were radios. Various units on the battlefield rallied beneath the flag of their leader. Atop a nearby hill, the overall commander had a signal corp with flags that corresponded to the units on the field. The commander coordinated the units on the field through the signal corps.

Pledging allegiance to the flag meant that you promised to play your part by following the flag even if we didn't understand the global significance of every command to march this way or that or dig breastworks there. The Pledge of Allegiance was a promise to trust our leaders and in turn demand that they be worthy of our trust.

There are some people who HATE the Pledge of Allegiance. Many of them have real problems submitting to any kind of external authority. They are virtually unemployable because they fight with the boss and they stir up conflict with other employees. They are agents of chaos.

A Sticky Wicket?

If the police were to respond to a domestic-incident at my address and I were to admit that I had beaten Mrs ERJ to death with a hammer*, Go Fund Me would not allow anybody to start a fund for "Newly Widowed Blogger ERJ".

The wife of the woman killed in Minneapolis is reported to have stated something like "I am responsible for her death" immediately after it occurred.

The Go Fund Me page for that wife and the dead woman's three children has collected more than a million dollars worth of pledges.

I have no quibbles about the money going to the three children through proper channels.

However, I also believe that the wife materially benefiting from the woman's demise before all of the criminal trials, civil suites and counter-suites and the appeals wind their way through the courts is shaky at best. After all, she admitted owning a significant share of the guilt/culpability at the time of the event.

 

*Just an example. Mrs ERJ is fine. 

Teaching a dog to bite

I had a supervisor tell me that the way to create a junkyard dog is to randomly reward and then punish a dog.

Dogs, in general, like and trust humans. They can bond with almost anybody as long as that person follows a few, simple rules.

That poses a barrier to creating a threatening, intimidating dog to guard properties like "junkyards".

According to my boss, the surefire way to create that kind of dog is to have random strangers first sweet-talk the dog and to give him treats and to pet him. As soon as the dog starts to reciprocate with body-language that shows trust...to have the stranger kick or TASER the dog.

"Hey, Big Boy, I am not mad at you..." Scylla whispers to the sailors.

Organizations that exercise ruthless ideological "purity" tests and then vilify former members who deviated the tiniest amount from the ideology spawn junkyard dogs. I wonder if the theory of junkyard dogs explains why so much "crazy" is manifesting around the periphery of the political landscape. 

Particularly troubling is that the extremes are rapidly mutating and what was once a fringe view is now viewed as "mainstream" by many. This mutating ideology means that mainstream members are pushed to the edges and are accused of disloyalty when, in fact, the dogma (pun not intended) is constantly changing.

America’s Most Common Drugs by Medicare Spending

 

Data from the Visual Capitalist.

Reformated to make it easier to read. 

Added later while Quicksilver is playing

The court heard how the 48-year-old Belgian male victim escaped from his home in Grobbendonk on March 18, 2025, barefoot and wearing only underwear and a T-shirt, when he fled a dog kennel where his wife, Anna V., had locked him. He staggered to a nearby home and knocked on a kitchen window, begging for help. 

You cannot make this stuff up...

A female prisoner was thrown into a locked cell (solitary confinement) at a Massachusetts prison after she told authorities she (had been) raped by one of at least four transgender sex predators housed there, a report has claimed.

According to an investigation conducted by The Hill, MCI-Framingham, the state's all-female prison, is punishing biological female inmates who speak up about alleged abuse at the hands of transgender inmates who also call it home.

"Always believe the woman".

"If I say that I am a woman today, then I am a woman and you have to believe everything I say and write because it is impossible for me to lie."

Random thought

It occurred to me that the number of genders is now roughly equal to the number of the members of the House of Representatives and Senate. 

If Noah came again, he would need an entire deck devoted to the Green-Blue-and-Purple Haired Obstrepottimii.

Avoid stupid... you know the rest

So there I was chatting it up with the gentleman who was selling me our new livestock. He threw in a sack o feed and bowls and assorted other goodies he no longer needed.

Seeing how he only lived ten miles from me, we played the "Do you know..." game.

In fact, there are several people we both knew.

It turned out that the seller was a firefighter, EMT and is "into" martial arts and weight-lifting.

So Barry (not his real name) insisted on telling me a story about one of his most recent martial arts experiences.

A traveling "Master" of their discipline had come to the dojo and given them a talk on "practical self-defense".

I am paraphrasing here, so cut me some slack

The Master said "Everybody gets it wrong because your beloved papa and grandpappy gave you bad information."

(Collective gasp from the audience)

"It is STUPID to wait for the person who is assaulting you to land the first punch."

At this point, the firefighter/EMT commented, "I made a lot of runs where the fight was over with one punch...the first and only one. Dude gets hit, falls back and knocks the back of his head on the curb, GAME OVER. Potentially fatal damage."

Back to the Master. "There is a fraction of a second when the person assaulting you has fully committed himself. His hands are balled into fists. He has thrown his striking hand back to wind up and throw a really hard punch. At that instant, if you step forward and hit him with a short, hard punch with your same-side hand (i.e. hit him with your left if he is drawing back to hit you with his right) it will happen so fast that nobody who is watching will really know who threw the first punch."

The ICE/Weaponized Vehicle event in Minnesota

This is what I think I saw on the video.

One ICE agent is engaging the driver through the driver's side window. 

A second ICE agent moved right-to-left (from the cameraman's/driver's perspective) in front of the vehicle.

The vehicle, which had been traveling in reverse, started moving forward.

The quality of the video is good enough to ascertain that the left, front wheel was "spinning" relative to the ground. It was also apparent from the perspective of the video that the driver was cranking her steering wheel to turn toward the right, away from the ICE agent at the driver's side window as she accelerated. 

Given reaction times and angles of view, the ICE agent who was in front of the vehicle would be unlikely to see the angle of the front tires. He would not know that the driver was cranking the steering wheel and was turning to the right and might have missed that agent.

• There is evidence that it was a "righteous shooting". The tires were clearly spinning as she accelerated with great vigor as the vehicle was pointed toward the ICE officer who was stationary and in front of the vehicle.
• There is evidence that she was not trying to hit the ICE agent in front of her, i.e. the front tires (which he probably could not see from his angle) turning to the right.

And this is why I don't go stupid places at stupid times with stupid people and do stupid things. People who do that sometimes get unlucky and die. Things happen fast. Adrenaline. Fog-of-war. Tunnel-vision.

To play a theme on what the Master was lecturing about to the students at the dojo, we do not live life in real-time. It is impossible. Due to scan-rates and the time it takes for our nerve impulses to travel to our brains, what we see as "reality" is at least 0.200 seconds old. It is history. Then our cognitive processes (FIFO through the stream of sensory data) and "quality checks" adds another 0.30 seconds. Sadly, when shit-is-going-down, the people who are in-the-soup do not have the luxury of slowing down the video to 25% speed and viewing all 5 viewing angles multiple times. They are acting on information that is half-a-second old.

Her demise was unfortunate. I suspect that she was hyper-focused on the agent who was at her car window and never saw the ICE agent who had moved in front of her vehicle while she was backing up. If so, the ultimate issue is that she was accelerating her vehicle forward with incomplete knowledge of what/who was in front of her.

When I shoot a gun, I need to be aware of what is downrange in a cone that is far greater than the +/- two minute-of-angle cone that my bullet might travel in. Fleshy targets influence bullets the way glass lenses bend light. Bullets ricochet off of the ground or branches they encounter.

At a minimum, the angle of the cone of risk is more like +/- 60 degrees with is approximately 2000 times greater than the "theoretical" cone.

I believe that drivers of a motor vehicles are also responsible for a generous cone-of risk to either side of them most likely path