Rip Snorter's Blog

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President, Former Commander in Chief, Allied Expeditionary Forces, Europe, WWII:

Dwight David Eisenhower

 

Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961

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Good evening, my fellow Americans: First, I should like to express my gratitude to the radio and television networks for the opportunity they have given me over the years to bring reports and messages to our nation. My special thanks go to them for the opportunity of addressing you this evening.
Three days from now, after a half century of service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on questions of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation.

My own relations with Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and finally to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation well rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. So my official relationship with Congress ends in a feeling on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations.

To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people.

Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.

But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.

Of these, I mention two only.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

So – in this my last good night to you as your President – I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I – my fellow citizens – need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nations' great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it.

Thank you, and good night.

We're in a time when a lot of Americans are going to have differing opinions about whether we should be fighting in the war we're fighting now.  We all came to whatever position we occupy on the issue from different directions.  We've arrived in different places.

Beginning any discussion about this war we're fighting with the inference that people who differ in their opinions are dupes, tools, being used by 'liberals', or 'war mongering conservatives' isn't condusive to any discussion at all. 

About the only thing America has left of some idealized America of the past is that people can still express their ideas, mostly without fear of being arrested or mobbed.

I'm planning to continue expressing mine without calling any names, without implying anyone's a fool for holding a differing opinion.

There's no moral high-ground to be attained by any of us for waving our past military experience around, the friends and relatives we lost in some forgotten war.

That one's already behind us.

We can learn from the divisiveness it caused in this country, if we're lucky, and leave the airwaves open for differing opinions without rancor.

Jack

 

 

 

 

 

Ever wondered why cats make such a pain of themselves late at night?

 

Daytime.

 

But while I'm on the subject of hats.  I noticed someone made a blog entry concerning somebody-or-other and his hat a few days back.

I'm open minded.  I try not to hold it against a man if he doesn't wear a hat, or if he wears a small one.  A lot of people have stuff underneath where a hat would go (sunburns, bald pates, purple hair, etc) and I suppose I understand vanity well enough to comprehend why a person mightn't want to hide it with a hat.

On the other hand,  a man with a nose of the sort I follow around needs to keep some skin on it by offering it a bit of shade.

Try not to hold it against me.

Jack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A while back I posted this under the heading, The Beginnings of a Unified Theory on Number Behavior (Or some other lofty title):

1)  The numbers for all the lotteries are selected from the same energy source, or are all measuring the same phenomenon.  The system is fundamentally mechanical.

2)  The numbers behave individually as single digits, 0 through 9.

3)  When the digits merge with other digits the right digit carries the force, while the left digit drives the affinity selections.

4)  The left digits are usually drawn to select 'mates' as high on the 0-9 scale as is 'possible' within the context of whatever  is driving the system.  Some attractions and affinities appear to be considerably stronger than others and occur more frequently.  But all these behaviors are relatively consistent throughout the pool of lotteries and their histories.

5)  The numbers are the 'players', and they are poor and under-educated.  They are primitive, evidently unaware of post-Grecian mathmatics.  Their behavior leans to 1, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, etc, or 1, 10, 20, 30, as an example, or 4, 14, 24, 34, while the 40, 41, 42, 43 seems to comfortably work within the same system.

6)  The most effective place to get a general view of what's happening now and what's going to happen with the lottery systems is in the Keno games and their histories where the numbers go highest.

But all this is looking at symptoms and manifestations.  We're examining the engine roar, the torque on the drive wheels, the RPMs, without any understanding of the fuel system and other components.

That flower, or mandala at the top of this entry is a Tilley hat and a pair of sunglasses.  The way we're seeing it as a flower rhymes with the way we're prone to percieve number bahaviors.

Someone's told us they're random.  Someone taught us to think in mathmatics.  We're primitives attempting to understand the magic of an automobile.

Jack

Naturally, a theory isn't much use unless it can predict the future behavior of numbers.  I've been searching unlikely places for examples of how a person might have predicted draws that hadn't happened yet.  I've also been looking for places higher-than-matrix numbers occur on some 'random' basis.  Seemed the Keno games would be a middling good place to nose around.

Here's the latest PB draw:

8/13/2005 1 2 18 37 43 37

Here are a couple of Keno draws immediately prior to that PB draw:

WA Lotto                   
 Aug 11, 2005 12 14 18 20 25 27 29 32 35 37 41 43 45 50 54 56 57 58 62 63
 Aug 10, 2005 7 9 11 14 17 18 19 24 25 30 42 44 50 52 54 57 61 74 75 77
 Aug 9, 2005 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 21 31 36 39 41 45 46 50 56 58 60 67 73
 Aug 8, 2005 3 5 8 10 12 16 20 34 36 41 43 45 54 59 60 63 68 75 78 80

You'll observe the 54/45 high numbers from Mega Millions 8/12/2005 8 37 38 45 54 21, appeared on the draw on the 8th.
You might also notice the 18, 37, and 43 of the PB draw of 8/13 appeared intact on WA Keno on August 11. 
But, while you're noticing that, also observe the 12 on the 11th draw.  If you'll accept the premise that those numbers are behaving as individual digits 0 through 9, you can't miss the fact that 12 is also a 1 and a 2.                   

NY Lotto repeated 37/73                   
 Aug 10, 2005 1 2 5 19 22 32 33 35 39 44 50 58 59 60 64 67 68 70 75 80
9-Aug-05 5 8 11 13 14 15 21 23 27 33 36 42 43 44 50 56 58 69 73 79
 Aug 8, 2005 8 15 16 18 19 20 30 35 38 45 47 52 55 56 58 65 69 73 77 80
       
Just for grins, consider 37 and 73 as the same number.  37 showed three times on two consecutive draws of MM and PB:

8/13/2005 1 2 18 37 43 37
8/12/2005 8 37 38 45 54 21

73 repeats twice August 8 and 9 on NY Lotto.

That's the 'sort of' good news.

But part of the theory I've been banking on is that the lotteries are all intertwined, behaving as a double helix and on somewhat the same timelines.  That appears to be true sometimes.  But take a look at a triple repeat of 32 on PB, and compare it to a similar event on Euro Millions:

Euro Millions       
 Mar 11, 2005 8 12 23 40 43 1 4
 Mar 4, 2005 12 24 32 37 39 7 9
 Feb 25, 2005 3 27 30 43 44 4 8
 Feb 18, 2005 20 21 26 32 46 8 9
 Feb 11, 2005 11 13 25 32 50 4 7
 Feb 4, 2005 1 8 11 30 40 7 8

Powerball
       
1/29/2005 11 16 20 29 41 12 
1/26/2005 5 32 43 47 48 33 
1/22/2005 11 23 32 33 34 38 
1/19/2005 9 18 32 33 49 27 
1/15/2005 21 26 37 49 51 25

Even though Euro Millions is on a weekly draw pattern, and PB is twice weekly, you'll observe there's a similar group of numbers shared by each.

That has to mean Euro Millions is operating as an individual lottery, ignoring the interim draws of other lotteries during the interim between draws.

Well, it seems to have to mean that, anyway.

No way of knowing what it actually means.  Still a long way to go toward understanding all this.

Jack 

Trust me on this.

PB  8/13/2005 1 2 18 37 43 37
MM  8/12/2005 8 37 38 45 54 21

Powerball 43/35     
5/12/2004 11 31 35 42 45 35
5/8/2004 3 9 17 37 43 39
5/5/2004 9 16 21 25 32 8
     
12/6/2003 21 24 37 41 45 39
12/3/2003 1 10 35 37 43 30
11/29/2003 14 36 39 43 51 15
     
7/17/2002 10 11 25 40 45 25
7/13/2002 3 22 37 42 49 8
7/10/2002 26 31 37 43 45 32
7/6/2002 2 9 27 36 39 13

MM 43/35

Mega Millions     
7/1/2005 14 25 41 42 50 40
6/28/2005 2 20 37 43 46 4
6/24/2005 14 43 44 50 56 7
     
3/25/2005 11 18 19 45 49 2
3/22/2005 6 11 27 37 43 34
3/18/2005 2 9 28 29 48 33
     
11/30/2004 10 20 22 28 52 4
11/26/2004 7 9 18 37 43 34
11/23/2004 8 30 32 35 51 17

PBMM     
3/25/2005 11 18 19 45 49 2
3/23/2005 23 29 37 40 45 38
3/22/2005 6 11 27 37 43 34
3/19/2005 1 21 28 32 41 9
3/18/2005 2 9 28 29 48 33
     
5/12/2004 11 31 35 42 45 35
5/11/2004 9 25 30 34 37 30
5/8/2004 3 9 17 37 43 39
5/7/2004 14 17 19 44 50 17
5/5/2004 9 16 21 25 32 8

11/30/2004 10 20 22 28 52 4
11/27/2004 16 28 35 36 47 31
11/26/2004 7 9 18 37 43 34
11/24/2004 3 19 47 49 53 4
11/23/2004 8 30 32 35 51 17

Euro Millions       
 Oct 22, 2004 1 9 23 25 40 3 9
 Oct 15, 2004 14 21 22 37 43 5 8
 Oct 8, 2004 1 10 12 16 48 2 6

California Super Lotto PLUS      
     
 Dec 13, 2003 6 20 26 36 46 27
 Dec 10, 2003 17 20 25 37 43 11
 Dec 6, 2003 1 12 20 38 46 5
     
 Sep 25, 2002 13 17 22 24 42 19
 Sep 21, 2002 8 32 37 38 43 25
 Sep 18, 2002 30 18 23 27 41 22
     
 Feb 13, 2002 1 4 19 28 46 4
 Feb 9, 2002 8 22 28 37 43 6
 Feb 6, 2002 3 32 36 42 46 24

NY Lotto       
 Jun 11, 2005 13 23 29 30 43 47 25
 Jun 8, 2005 18 23 27 37 43 50 57
 Jun 4, 2005 23 29 46 48 52 57 15
       
 Jun 7, 2003 4 10 22 34 40 54 56
 Jun 4, 2003 13 29 37 43 51 58 12
 May 31, 2003 12 16 33 42 50 59 3
       
 Feb 1, 2003 21 29 38 39 51 54 35
 Jan 29, 2003 3 4 30 37 43 53 13
 Jan 25, 2003 10 12 34 45 51 55 48
       
Texas Lotto Texas        
 Aug 13, 2005 4 5 13 22 39 33 
 Aug 10, 2005 18 24 37 41 43 10 
 Aug 6, 2005 1 10 19 35 42 40 
       
 Jul 13, 2005 1 19 22 23 29 33 
 Jul 9, 2005 3 13 37 39 43 44 
 Jul 6, 2005 13 19 33 38 41 18 
       
 Jun 9, 2004 11 20 24 29 42 15 
 Jun 5, 2004 25 28 37 43 44 18 
 Jun 2, 2004 3 6 11 30 38 30 
       
 Jan 10, 2004 1 7 30 38 42 21
 Jan 7, 2004 24 29 37 40 43 25
 Jan 3, 2004 5 7 22 24 32 35
     
 Nov 15, 2003 2 21 28 37 38 35
 Nov 12, 2003 8 29 37 38 43 3
 Nov 8, 2003 5 11 16 17 34 7

 

Make of them what you will.

Jack

Ruidoso Steak-House
 
Glanced at her reflection
In the plate-glass window
New squash-blossom turquoise
Sassy Stetson
Patted 50ish blonde curls
And wished
They'd eaten at the casino

Valley of the Mountain Gods
 
Where this didn't happen
Wrinkled pretty nose

"Don't give him anything
He'll just get drunk!"

Stage whispered
To her Houston lady friend
As though he wasn't there

She was right of course
Except the old man Mescalero
Was already drunk
 
He turned away
Then turned back and mumbled
 
"Sing the Song of Life each day
Or when the time arrives you won't know how
To sing the Song of Death."

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

You mightn't be aware of it, but the Kokopeli stick-figures you see around originated with the Chacoan, Anasazi, Mimbres, Mogollon, Hohokam cultures I belabored a couple of entries ago.  This one's actually a tree root I dug from under the floor of my living room.

 

As for you blog-readers and your secret, silent demands that I tell you a bit more about them, I understand.  I hear your cries, even though you've suffered silently.  Here's a bit more of the unfinished manuscript I used for the earlier entry:

 

The mountain I used to prospect to for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water.  Big ruins.  I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.

One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset.  In the basin below there's a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains.  I'd discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely.  What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses? 

But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob!  Yon damned Chacoans used it to mark summer solstice!

A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of how it must have been for those people. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave.  They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.

Then one day they  just left.  What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.  Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind.  Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things you couldn’t carry.

Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, thinking how it must have been.  Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn.  A few weeks of  planning.  What to take?  What to leave behind.

Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before.  At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad.  Knowing they'd never go home again, wondering about the place they were going. 

Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were  kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have.  Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancesters had roamed for 2000 years.

They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths.  But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside.  The kids probably screeching aloud enough to cover everyone elses sorrow.

As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages.  The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them.  They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.  Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village.  They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they'd ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.

Jack

 

 

Powerball
8/13/2005 1 2 18 37 43 37

NY Keno
 Aug 11, 2005 2  4 5 11 13 14 16 17 18 26 32 34 41 43 57 61 66 73 74 76

WA Lotto Keno
 Aug 12, 2005 2 3 7 15 16 18 19 20 25 31 33 35 39 46 47 56 66 67 71 74
 Aug 11, 2005 12 14 18 20 25 27 29 32 35 37 41 43 45 50 54 56 57 58 62 63

Make of it what you will.

Jack

 

 

 

 

 

I promised in an earlier blog entry to re-visit the subject of those ancients in New Mexico.

This is a long and somewhat tedious piece of a manuscript I began several years ago.

I never finished it, so I'll share it with you if you're interested:

 

Visits to Chaco Canyon and other ancient ruins are interesting, but the experience is diminished by the layers of protective bureaucracy and the signs forbidding stepping off the established trails, or threatening punishment for spitting on the ground where the Chacoans spat.  An unprepared, isolated visit to Pueblo Bonito or Hovenweep certainly evokes wonder.  But for the unannointed visitor it leaves a two dimensional impression of the people who lived there.  I’m providing this brief history and a few personal anecdotes to fatten the image of what happened here and hopefully narrow the distance between modern visitors and the Chacoans.

Western New Mexico Zuni traditions say a branch of their tribe migrated south in the distant past.  Occasionally the tribal government discusses a proposal to send a delegation into Central and South America in an attempt to re-locate these lost relatives.

Who were these Zuni-cousins?  Where did they live, and where did they go?

The answer to where they lived seems obvious.  Western New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, and southeastern Utah are pocked with the ruins of a great people; an enormous population which vanished over a relatively short time between 1100 and 1300 CE.  If the Zuni tradition has any basis in fact, these were probably the cousins referred to.  The Chacoans.  The Anasazi.  The Mimbres.  The Mogollons.

Where did they go?  When those countless villages, towns, and cities emptied during the 12th century the populations either died, or migrated.  There’s no forensic evidence to suggest they all died of plague, starvation or warfare.  More likely they migrated.

Some might have settled on the Rio Grande, but there during the 12th Century there was no population explosion there.  Several generations passed between the disappearance of the Chacoans and the Tegua settlements on the Great River.  There are no unambiguous links between the later populations and those that existed prior to 1200 CE. 

When the Chacoans abandoned their great houses the cultural continuity traceable from 500 BC until 1100 – 1200 CE ended.  The enormous population of western New Mexico didn’t simply vanish from the highlands and re-surface along the Rio Grande.

Where did they go?  A combination of Zuni tradition and Spanish records suggest an answer.  At the time the Anasazis ended their 2000 year long stay in New Mexico a numerically strong, socially organized, highly sophisticated people suddenly sprand into being and occupied the Valley of Mexico.  The Aztecs.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a conquisidore lieutenant of Cortez, is the only pre-Spanish conquest record that speaks to the origins of the Aztecs.  Neighboring tribes had a good deal to say about them.  Diaz reports that the Aztecs were relatively new to the area, having migrated en mass from the north about a century earlier.  Roughly concurrent with the disappearance of the Anasazi.

Academics who smugly dismiss this coincidence should be asked to explain. Where, in the north of Mexico, other than the Anasazi and Mimbres, could the Aztecs have originated?  Where is there evidence of a large population of culturally developed tribesmen available to migrate to the Valley of Mexico?  Where are the ruins those Aztecs-to-be left behind?

The people who became Chacoans, or Anasazis, and later, I postulate, Aztecs were in New Mexico for more than 2500 years. The pre-Chacoans were a nomadic people when they began leaving signs of their presence,  probably by 2000 – 1500 BC.  They  didn’t arrive as agronomic people.  They gradually came to rely on horticulture and smaller animals, rather than larger game over many centuries. 

Pre-Chacoans are distinguished from their predecessors by their stone tools, which  were markedly different from those of earlier residents who dined almost exclusively on larger game.  Although there were variations regionally in the toolkit traditions of the latecomers, there was an overall general similarity.  This root similarity suggests they probably were of a single language group and of shared origins prior to their migration.

From 1800 BC until 500 BC the pre-Chacoan population increased rapidly.  The residents gradually settled into more permanent campsites, and use of bone tools was supplanted by more wooden tools, indicating that hunting played a diminishing role in their lives.  The use of sub-grade storage bins around 500 BC eventually displaced nomadism and led to the construction of seasonal pit houses. 

The first gardens and small grained corn appeared on the scene during the San Juan period, from 3000 BC to 1800 BC.  Concurrent with this, the stone points decreased in size, indicating the hunts were for smaller game.  And during this time the pre-Chacoan numbers increased far out of proportion to what the population had ever been in previously.

Around 300 CE the first pottery came into use in pre-Chacoan southern New Mexico.  The rapid spread of this innovation throughout Chacoland is evidence of the level of communications between sub-units.  This reinforces the view that they were one people.  Pottery spread, not merely as finished products, but as a skill, a craft.  Craftsmen were exchanging methods of manufacture which were not obvious in finished products.

This spread of craftsmanship was probably embodied in pre-nuptial females moving outside their own villages for husbands, carrying the skills of their village with them.  Assuming these were all one people, marriages between southern pre-Mimbres girls to northern pre-Chacoan  husbands might well have been widespread.  This would explain the (for those times) lightning spread of pottery-making techniques from southern to northern New Mexico.

The social and technological changes were gradual over the centuries until around 700 CE.  The villages remained small, a few dwellings, and life didn’t vary a great deal from village to village.

Between 700-800 CE a fortuitous combination circumstances created a population explosion.  Favorable weather conditions, improved agricultural techniques, bin and pottery grain storage, pottery water storage, and effective winter shelters were a few of the ingredients that jelled to allow the surprising era known as Pueblo II, or Chaco Classic and Mimbres Classic.  Scholars have other names for the period, but I’ll stay with those two for the simplicity.

The most obvious characteristic of Pueblo II is the emergence of large, above ground dwellings.  In northern New Mexico this was concurrent with the disappearance of pit houses by around 900 CE, and constitutes the primary difference between Mimbres and the Chacoans.

In southern, Mimbres, New Mexico, the use of above ground structures didn’t  become widespread until a century later, around 1000 CE, and pit houses continued to be used, concurrently.  But Chacoland was a big place, communications were slower, and it makes sense there’d be minor differences in the outlying areas and that changes on the periphery would come more slowly.  It might even be that all the above-ground houses were constructed by the northern cousins to house migrants.  But more of that later.

For reasons of their own, modern scholars prefer to think of these two groups as distinct cultures or civilizations with an underlying implication that they were politically, socially, spiritually, and culturally autonomous.  Doubtless there is some evidence to support this, though it isn’t necessarily true.  The same evidence and reasoning processes used by archiologists is available to the lay person, and the resulting opinions can differ between reasonable men. 

For the purposes of this book I’m hypothesizing the Mimbres and Anasazi were probably roughly the same people,  though they had some different pottery and building techniques.  The Mimbres were a century behind the Chacoan building innovations to above ground structures, but they lived in an area with deep sedimentation.  The incentive for above ground dwellings might not  have been so strong as in the rocky northern areas characterized by basalt bedrock. 

During the final stages of Chacoan development, the Chacoan Empire for lack of a better term, probably included a thousand or more cities, towns, and villages and widely varying geographical and meteorological conditions.  Variations in building style don’t necessarily indicate anything other than adaptations within a single culture and political structure to local conditions. 

No one would seriously suggest that because New Yorkers live in high rise apartments, Bostoners, in Brownstone 19th century mansions, and New Mexicans in Adobe houses, that we are a different people, culture, or political structure.  To draw the conclusion that Chacoans had too little imagination and creativity to adapt to geography and climate overlooks most of what we know about them.

What scholars do know, and what is obvious from the ruin sites is that the population around the American continental divide exploded between 900CE and 1100.  More than 10,000 building sites from that period have been found in western New Mexico.  Those 10,000 sites probably represent only a fraction of what is actually there.  Most were from the brief period defined as Mimbres Classic or Chacoan Classic. Considering the past, the pace of changes in the way of life went into high gear around 900.  Within a few decades the Chacoan Empire, or Chaco-Mimbres Confederacy, if it didn’t exist before, came into being.

Today, hundreds of  known Chacoan sites have never been documented.  Many others haven’t even been found. It’s anyone’s guess how many people actually lived in this arid region when the Chacoans were doing whatever it was they did and thinking whatever it was they thought to justify that conduct.

Native Americans in the region and archiologists from everywhere are equally puzzled by most aspects of Chacoan behavior the instant they get beyond discussing what they ate and how they came to eat it.  We know a great deal about their building styles, their pottery design, their weapons and tools, and even their toys, if toys are what they were.  These are varied and interesting.

But a wide and deep gulf churns between the Chacoan phenomenon and the sum of it’s parts manifested in artifacts.  Every few years the academic explanations for the Chacoan behaviors change, reverse themselves, or fragment.  The academic zig-zagging of opinion clothed as fact is the result of the dearth of evidence to support conclusions of any sort.  A century ago the Chacoans were widely believed to be pre-Aztecs, as demonstrated by the naming of the Aztec ruin in northern New Mexico.  No physical evidence has surfaced to refute that belief.  All that has changed is academic opinion, which is fluid in any case. 

Differences in potsherds and building techniques of Aztecs and Chacoans as a means of refuting the coincidental connection between the two appears flawed.  This premise relies on the assumption that the builders of Pueblo Bonito were shockingly ignorant and unable to adapt to local conditions.

Such logic further assumes the disruption of historical continuity of 2 millenia involving a mass migration lasting a century, would not result in evolved architecture, art, and tool making.  The Aztecs migrated to an area with a sizeable indiginous population and pre-existing religious, architectural, political, and cultural traditions.  It shouldn’t come as any surprise that they assimilated much from the conquered, as conquerers have done throughout human history.

If most of what we know of Chacoans comes from artifacts, the conclusions we draw from that knowledge depend upon geographical continuity uninterrupted by outside influences.  If the Chacoans had continued to occupy their cities, but had been overrun by another people no one would suggest the nature of the artifacts wouldn’t change abruptly.  However, because there is, to my knowledge, no historical precedent for a powerful people voluntarily displacing itself and moving into a populous area far away, peopled by similarly organized and strong cultures, the results can only be guessed.  Especially if most of the artifacts on which the culture depended were produced by slaves, as I surmise
those of the Chacoans were, and those of the Aztecs certainly were.

Slavery among the Chacoans  can’t be directly proven by artifacts.  The uses for tools, weapons, utensils, and basic structures are generally obvious enough.  More obvious than, say, a primitive man could surmise by examining a can opener or steering wheel.  But the understanding of the segment of society that provided labor to create those tools, weapons, utensils, and basic structures can only be derived indirectly.

With the Chacoans, though the knowledge is indirect, it is no less certain.  In many bedrock ways the Chacoans already resembled the later Aztecs, long before their migration.  They knew how to handle a large population of slaves, and they had a tradition of dedicating massive energy to public works projects of esoteric value.

When the modern observer, layman, scholar, or Native American tries to explain curbed roads 20 feet wide, arrow-straight, leading between Chacoan towns, he’s functioning under the same disadvantages as the primitive puzzling over the can opener.  Those roads are the moral equivalent of modern Interstate Highways in the sense that they go over obstacles, not around them.  They required an enormous amount of energy and resources to create, and evidently to maintain.

Anasazi roads, however, differ from the modern superhighway in some crucial ways.  They were built by a people without the advantage of bulldozers, for traffic that had no wheels, and for a population that probably would have been equally well-served by  dirt tracks.  There is nothing among the surviving artifacts to suggest the size of the Chacoan population required such highways.  An archiologist acquaintance of mine once quipped that the roads were built in anticipation of the invention of the wheel, the gasoline engine, and the automobile.

The modern inclination to venerate the Native American ancients creates a mild taboo surrounding the implications of all this.  We see hints of the explanation in other aspects of the ruins, but here it is most obvious:  the Chacoans had a surplus of cheap labor, on whom they placed such miniscule value as to squander it.  An abundance of slave labor.

No population would hand-build roads they didn’t need over, or through obstacles, rather than around them if they had to do the work themselves. or even pay a reasonable price for the project.  There is cost associated even with maintaining slaves, and if there weren’t a surplus, the labor would probably have been expended on more immediate needs such as farm labor, tool making, building shelters, and pottery and basket making. 

The indications that the Anasazis were slaveholders are everywhere, though these indicators don’t get a lot of notice.  However, acknowledging this aspect of pre-Columbian life is hardly a slur on Native Americans.  Circa 900-1100 CE was a time when slavery was rampant in Europe, Asia, Asia Minor, and Africa.  That the Americas were no exception only confirms that humans everywhere share similar flaws.

If Diaz’ eyewitness Toltec sources are to be believed, the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico in overwhelming numbers as a strong, cohesive force.  Upon arrival they immediately manifested behavior that was not entirely unlike the mysterious behavior of the Chacoans.  If those Aztecs didn’t originate in Chacoland, where?  Why, when Cozzens visited the Zunis in 1857, did he observe an elaborate parade celebrating over the eventual return of Montezuma? 

For that matter, why do so many of the puebloan tribes along the Rio Grande have similar traditions tied directly to the desired return of Aztec power?  No colateral dreams existed within the neighboring peoples in Mexico the day after the last Aztec surrendered his past to the combined Indian and Spanish Cortez forces.  The Aztec mystique is venerated centuries after their demise, but only in the 2000 year homeland vacated by the Chacoans.

Modern archiologists and other scholars don’t give much weight to Native American traditions for some good reasons.  The Rio Grande puebloans don’t have a tradition tying them to the Chacoans through ancestry, whereas scholars believe such a tradition would be appropriate.  The Navajos, however, have strong tribal memories of Anasazi ancestry, although when the first Din’e arrived in Chacoland the ruins of Canyon de Chelle, Aztec, Salmon, Hovenweep, Mesa Verde, and Gila had echoed hollow and vacant for three centuries.  The wild tribes who probably comprised the majority of the slave population of the Chacoans allowed plenty of time to pass before they took their first cautious footsteps in to make certain they were really gone.

One of the earliest Spanish explorers in Arizona and New Mexico, Cabeza de Baca or Frey Marcos de something-or-other reported that when he visited a people to the west, probably Hohokam, they gestured along his back-trail with some animation and trepidation.  They were adamant that the area he’d been through, Chacoland, was the home of some terrible, ugly people.  The Spaniard was surprised enough by this to comment on it later. 

The Spaniard hadn’t seen anyone in that country who was markedly different from the Hohokam.  The identity of the nasty people the Hohokams on the edge of Chaco country were referring to is a thing to ponder.  The Hohokam view bears a striking similarity to the feelings Aztec neighbors had at the time of the arrival of Cortez with his European forces.  That the Toltecs, themselves no daisies by all reports, were willing to take their chances siding with the unknown European evil over the known Aztec says a great deal about the pleasures of having Aztecs for neighbors.

Standing almost anywhere in Chaco Canyon, looking at the butte that dominates the valley, it’s easy to imagine a pyramid in the Valley of Mexico as a stylized replica of that sacred tribal monument.  I’ve never seen this anywhere in print, but once, years ago I was poking around Pueblo Bonito.  A Din’e workman was doing some digging near me, and when he took a break, knowing the Navajo proscriptions about corpse contact, I asked him if they ever accidently dug into graves during their upkeep activities. 

“Not here.”  He puckered his lips and gestured with his nose toward the butte.  “The bodies are all over there.”
 
“There?”  I squinted down the valley.

“At the base of the butte.  All over the place.  Hundreds of them.  They dropped them off from the top.”

I’d been through the evening lectures about Chacoan astronomy artifacts on the butte, but this one took me by complete surprise.  I’d never heard the slightest mention of Chacoan activities there that weren’t entirely  benign.  In retrospect, I realize I’d been distracted by the bloody similarities of purpose between the one in the Valley of Mexico and those Mayan pyramids further south in Yucatan and Guatamala.  In view of the reported practices atop the Aztec pyramid in the Valley of Mexico reported by Diaz, I should have guessed the butte would somehow echo the behavior.  The suspicion verging on conviction that the Chacoans and the Aztecs were the same people was as real to me then
as it is now.

The Chacoan phenomenon had deep roots in the soil of 20 centuries.  It flourished and bloomed between 900 CE and 1100 CE.  There don’t appear to have been any false starts, changes of direction, or serious threats.  But around 1100 CE something happened to change all of that.  The Chacoans began to formulate a plan to get the hell out of Dodge. 

Maybe it has no connection, but they made that decision to find greener pastures at almost the exact moment of the most cataclysmic geological event in human memory in northern New Mexico.  The eruption of the McCarty volcano, dead center in the heart of Chacoland spread lava 35 miles long, 7+ miles wide, and 40 feet deep through the valley floor east of the Zuni Mountains.  If there’s no connection between that and the decision of the Chacoans to leave, it’s still quite a coincidence. 

The scholars don’t agree on how they left, or why, or where they went.  Nobody knows what happened to them.  From this point forward everything I write is unadulterated supposition, as thin as the theories of the scholards.  It’s strictly my own theory, and so far as I’m aware, no one else on the planet considered it.  But the theory explains certain mysteries found in the ruins, and I’m not aware of anything that contradicts it.

I don’t recall the name of her, but there’s a supposedly true story of ship in modern times found at rest in the open sea in sound condition.  The coal fires were dead, but the throttle was open to cruise speed, and there were meals set in the galley that were long cold.  No sign of violence, mishap, or weather hinted at what happened on that ship, but there was no sign of the crew, and they were never found.  The only thing out of place, as I recall, was that one of the lifeboats was missing.  Otherwise it’s as though Scottie came down unexpectedly and beamed them all up.

Similarly, there used to be a ghost town up near Red River called Anchor, or Midnight.  As late as the 1950s the buildings were mostly sound and the cabins were still partially furnished.  During the 1930s the old timers claimed there were still dishes and cutlery on some of the tables. The only way a person could visit there was by horseback, and it was a long ride.  The population of that town vanished, I was told, during a 24 hour period during the 1880s.  But unlike the ship in the previous anecdote, there’s no mystery about what happened in Midnight, or Anchor, New Mexico.  The mine was running out, and word reached town about a silver strike on the other side of the mountains.
 
The crucial difference in these two stories rests in the fact that people from Midnight survived to account for the way they behaved, whereas the crew of the ship didn’t.  If someone had survived, you can trust that those crew members conducted themselves in way that made sense to them at the time, and it turned out to be the wrong decision.  In a similar situation, any of us might have made the same choices they did. 

On the other hand, if some disaster had killed all the miners from that town without leaving a trace of the carcasses and what had happened, the story of Midnight would be one of those mysteries on television documentaries.  Someone surviving to explain is the key.

I believe the same is true of the Anasazis.  Within the context of their lives and experience, whatever they did made perfect sense to them.  This is probably true despite the evidence of social or political turmoil of their last half century in New Mexico.  Evidently there wasn’t universal agreement on the matter.  A lot of people during that time attempted to influence the activities of other people by force of arms.  These upheavals reveal themselves in ruins that were burned so quickly as to leave charred
corncobs with the kernals intact alongside human remains.

The Chacoans were more in tune with celestial, meteorical, and geological events than most of us are today.  They went to pains to record and observe the solstice and the equinox.  About the time of their decision to leave they made petroglyphs archiologists believe commemorates the observation of a super-nova.  They noted, and recorded the passage of comets.  When the earth spoke, the Anasazi leaders listened.

Based upon this sketchy evidence, I believe the migration decision was adopted, carefully planned, and executed in a manner worthy of the administrative being Chacoan society had become.  Within a relatively short time the earth and heavens spoke.  Humans in Chacoland attempted to interprete those momentous messages and apply them to their own lives, as humans everywhere have always done. 

A strange star appeared in the heavens.  The earth shook and spewed out liquid, glowing rock, and ash and smoke filled the sky.  Someone in authority made the decision to go south. 

They sent explorers to find a likely destination.  When those explorers returned with descriptions of the Valley of Mexico, it somehow satisfied whatever requirements they expected, but they had to prepare for the journey.

As befits a complex social organization, they sent builders along the route of march to build way stations, and grain bins to house and feed the weary travellers. They imposed a heavy tax burden all over Chacoland to fill those bins.  And as men everywhere have always done, some villages resisted or attempted to evade those taxes.

Way stations were only briefly occupied except, probably, by caretakers.  The remains of some of these sites, such as the Gila Cliff Dwellings, still had bins half full of stored corn several hundred years later when they were discovered by white men.

When the preparations were all in place they began to empty Chacoland and trickle southward.  Slowly village after village was abandoned until half a century later nothing remained of the Anasazis except vacant dwellings and half-filled grain-bins along the route for stragglers and rear-guards. 

Meanwhile, the Toltecs and other tribes around the Valley of Mexico discovered a problem had settled into the neighborhood. 

 

Jack

 

For those who (if any) are paying attention to such things, here's the rundown:

High numbers triplets 54/45

MM

8/12/2005 8 37 38 45 54 21

There's no history on MM and PB for 54/45, so it has to come from other lotteries.

 

New York Lotto       
 Nov 26, 2003 8 12 21 51 54 56 26
 Nov 22, 2003 21 24 31 35 45 54 44
 Nov 19, 2003 17 26 31 39 47 50 41

 Aug 31, 2002 7 17 36 38 48 55 10
 Aug 28, 2002 9 35 41 45 54 55 43
 Aug 24, 2002 13 15 19 32 34 48 2

Illinois Lotto 54/45       

 Aug 2, 1997 2 15 16 21 48 50 
 Jul 30, 1997 11 20 45 49 50 54 
 Jul 26, 1997 1 16 22 42 49 50 

 Dec 4, 1996 18 22 26 28 37 53 
 Nov 30, 1996 33 44 45 47 48 54 
 Nov 27, 1996 1 9 29 43 49 54 

  Jul 5, 1995 2 13 20 32 33 43 
 Jul 1, 1995 10 35 43 45 47 54 
 Jun 28, 1995 1 7 11 34 41 43 

 Apr 20, 1994 5 28 33 39 48 53
 Apr 16, 1994 17 18 27 28 45 54
 Apr 13, 1994 10 18 33 45 46 47

 

37 was also part of a repeat/double sequence between MM and PB:

37 repeats

PB

1/8/2005 9 11 22 24 43 2
1/5/2005 4 7 10 30 37 37
1/1/2005 22 23 26 44 47 12
     
12/13/2003 17 19 25 26 44 19
12/10/2003 4 17 26 37 40 15
12/6/2003 21 24 37 41 43 39
12/3/2003 1 10 35 37 43 30
11/29/2003 14 36 39 43 51 15
11/26/2003 1 3 16 37 41 19
11/22/2003 9 12 17 29 45 4
     
7/17/2002 10 11 25 40 45 25
7/13/2002 3 22 37 42 49 8
7/10/2002 26 31 37 43 45 32
7/6/2002 2 9 27 36 39 13

MM

2/26/2002 6 19 22 40 44 27
2/22/2002 4 11 37 40 44 9
2/19/2002 25 27 37 40 48 1
2/15/2002 2 19 41 45 47 24
     
7/20/2001 14 34 38 43 47 15
7/17/2001 17 22 27 37 49 18
7/13/2001 24 35 37 45 50 35
7/10/2001 3 8 17 28 50 15
     
9/1/2000 4 9 26 30 31 4
8/29/2000 4 17 31 37 47 9
8/25/2000 34 35 37 47 48 12
8/22/2000 6 16 18 34 41 2

MMPB

6/14/2005 1 10 29 48 49 36
6/11/2005 3 10 14 24 46 37
6/10/2005 14 29 31 37 50 34
6/8/2005 10 36 40 42 43 42
6/7/2005 7 14 28 46 47 25
     
     
3/26/2005 9 12 35 41 51 36
3/25/2005 11 18 19 45 49 2
3/23/2005 23 29 37 40 45 38
3/22/2005 6 11 27 37 43 34
3/19/2005 1 21 28 32 41 9
3/18/2005 2 9 28 29 48 33

4/19/2005 5 6 14 42 47 3
4/16/2005 11 38 44 45 51 41
4/15/2005 25 26 37 39 49 29
4/13/2005 6 13 37 51 52 25
4/12/2005 15 20 43 47 50 24
4/9/2005 1 11 35 46 53 29

Lotto Texas  37/37     
     
 Apr 27, 2005 6 17 31 32 43 10
 Apr 23, 2005 4 22 36 37 44 37
 Apr 20, 2005 9 10 16 25 44 37
     
 Mar 10, 2004 5 6 15 23 36 1
 Mar 6, 2004 14 18 27 37 44 37
 Mar 3, 2004 4 25 27 39 43 28

NY Lotto       
 Aug 14, 2004 3 19 36 44 46 55 32
 Aug 11, 2004 2 37 41 46 47 50 35
 Aug 7, 2004 7 15 17 20 22 37 29
 Aug 4, 2004 18 23 25 27 48 57 36
       
 Nov 19, 2003 17 26 31 39 47 50 41
 Nov 15, 2003 22 25 35 37 44 52 31
 Nov 12, 2003 2 26 32 35 44 52 37
 Nov 8, 2003 10 11 32 34 35 46 50

 

Make of it what you will.

Good luck,

Jack

Trust me on this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I came across this bumper-sticker among my papers a while back.  It brought back a lot of memories a lot of you probably aren't old enough to share.

In 1967, the Vietnam War was still cranking up, more body counts every day.  In the streets, the universities, the restaurants, over the evening meals people were arguing over whether we had any business getting our young men killed in Vietnam.  Discussing how to end it.  Trying to understand why we were there at all.

There was no consensus yet, but there was also no forum for communicating to the Johnson Administration the growing dissatisfaction within the population concerning a foreign war with no clear objectives, no consistent strategy, no obvious way of winning, or even ending it.  In those days the citizenry was torn between the desire to support our troops who were fighting, but without the concommitant nuance of supporting a war many believed shouldn't be.

One of the ways the movement to get the hell out of Vietnam congealed was through empty rhetoric, such as this bumper sticker.

To a limited degree, it worked.  Johnson had enough difficulties as a result of Vietnam to convince him not to run for re-election in 1968.  The Vietnam War became a major issue in the election. 

If Lyndon Johnson had listened to the first murmerings of the people, this country would have been saved a lot of heartache, lives, and a piece of history that every president since would prefer to forget, as Lyndon Johnson's now mostly forgotten in favor of the next guy who actually was impeached (but almost certainly wouldn't have been if this population hadn't been so stirred up over Vietnam).

In the absence of any other means of communicating with the deaf, the rhetorical, empty threat of job loss isn't an altogether useless approach.

The alternative is for the citizenry to wait as quietly as grazing sheep for another endless war to run the full course, until people are throwing bricks and burning cars in the streets in the next step toward communicating with a deaf government.

Jack

From 900 BC until 1200 AD a larger human population thrived in western New Mexico, eastern Arizona, southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah and the adjoining geography in northern Mexico than lives there today.  They're known by many names.  The Anasazi (ancient ones) describes them as well as any other.

This was a civilization of builders, farmers, slave-holders, craftsmen and fighters.  Any visitor to the land they occupied is likely to discover their ruins, potsherds, artifiacts in some unexpected place.

Around 1125 AD they fought a bloody civil war.  Shortly thereafter,  they vanished entirely, possibly migrating to Mexico to become the Aztecs.

We can only speculate who these people were.  Only their ruins and broken artifacts testify to what they believed, how they lived, why they fought their civil war, and why they packed up one day to go elsewhere.

They probably resembled us in believing they were the greatest people of the greatest nation and nothing like them ever was.

 

No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
 
Wealthy woman young
No slave.
Those killers
Didn't kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her
Before emancipation
 
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
Stone hatchet to the head
She died and partly burned
 
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember

 

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

 

I used to know a guy named, Mike, down in Socorro.  A man with a lot of ideas.

During the mid-‘90s, about the time the Internet was cranking up big-time, Mike had the idea it would be cool to start an on-line raffle. 

Mike had some money lying around.  Just about enough to buy a full-sized Harley, and a large RV.  But he thought he could increase the amount of money he had by taking a risk.  He’d sell raffle tickets online for a Harley and a large RV without buying them until someone won the raffle.  If he didn’t sell enough tickets, he’d make up the difference with his savings.  But if he did sell enough tickets, he’d give away the Harley and RV, and pocket whatever extra came in.

It turns out raffles are illegal at almost any level, though the cops and prosecutors look the other way if they feel the cause is a good one, or if it’s just small potatoes.  But item one for Mike turned out to be that if he went online he’d be almost certain to be prosecuted.

Item 2, was the fact he was, in effect, proposing to raffle a motorcycle and an RV that didn’t exist.  The fact he didn’t own them yet compounded the felony he would be committing.

Now what Mike was proposing to do was precisely what lotteries do, as Todd’s pointed out repeatedly, routinely.  Raffling off something that doesn’t exist…. Money that they plan on earning as interest.

But, of course, when a government sanctioned, or government owned administrative entity commits an act that rhymes with something that would be a felony if an individual behaved identically, all’s well with the world.

Unless they happen to have a lot of attention focused on their behavior, as happened in Texas recently.

Similarly, I used to know a guy named Dan, who had a lot of cash lying around doing nothing.  He dreamed up an online something he called a ‘money club’, or ‘money pool’.  Members, Dan dreamed, would pay $5 per month into the pool.  Every month the total proceeds, minus 10 percent (to Dan as operational and administrative fees) would be handed out to some lucky member by a process known as Random Number Generator…. Something nearly identical to what’s being done by lotteries.  Except it would be private enterprise….. private sector.

Dan figured the payout percentages would be so much better, the odds so much better than any lottery that it would cause players to flock to him.  He might have been right.

But there was naturally a catch.  What he was proposing was and is a herd of felonies at almost every level of jurisdiction.  Even though what he proposed was a lot better for the players involved, than the competition (the government and the various legally recognized mob) could (read ‘would’) offer.

So neither of these ideas ever came to fruition, though each represented the cleaned up versions of corrupted first-cousins we all accept as normal in the lottery systems.

It’s surprising sometimes to see people who claim to believe in free enterprise so blindly support any government monopoly.

Jack

 

 

 

Nice bit of rainfall last night.

Back well before the English settlements on the Atlantic coastline, the pilgrims, all that, in Mexico, then in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and California, the Spaniards were busy boys carrying civilization, the Catholic religion, and rule by the Spanish monarchs into the southwest.  When Onate founded a Spanish seat of government the locals weren't overjoyed to be part of Spain, but that's how things worked everywhere in human history, and it's how things worked here.  Stronger human populations over-ran weaker ones.

For several generations things rocked along about as you'd expect.  Spaniards, tough gents, sometimes were over zealous in their rule.  Natives, operating on a somewhat different set of standards, were occasionally recalcitrant, or even bloodily cunning.

In 1680, it all came to a head.  Beginning in Taos, and San Juan Pueblos, an alliance of former enemies began a revolt, killing all Spaniards they could catch, men, women and children.  Those who managed to escape gathered in Santa Fe and withstood a long siege until an agreement was finally reached to allow them to trek to Mexico.

The retreat was a long, running fight until they reached El Paso, where they stayed for a decade until the re-conquest by Diego de Vargas.

When de Vargas returned, he was welcomed with open arms by the former rebels.

I'll explain why in another entry.

Jack