Wordless Wednesday
Author Archives: Dick
Flying the Flag
Here are two stories from this nearly naked city. I make no claim that they are related.
In April, 1982, my grandfather looked around at his life and said, “I’m 92 years old. I’ve outlived my family except my older brother. I’ve outlived my friends. I’ve outlived all the people I worked with. Let’s move to Florida.”
In April, 1982, the United States Border Patrol set up a roadblock at the “choke point,” the Last Chance Saloon in Florida City, to search for illegal aliens and drug runners. See, the Keys are islands you can drive to, but just one, two-lane road connects us to the United States.
The blockade of the Florida Keys backed up traffic and shut down the rum-and-beer trade in the Keys.
My aunt and uncle loved the Keys and had spent several years scouting out the best places to homestead.
Boppa read the news and the tea leaves and had a finger on the pulse from the piper on Mallory Square to Theater of the Sea, the 1946 marine mammal park on Islamorada.
Roadblocks? Pissed off populace? Seceding from the Union? A naval battle with a loaf of stale Cuban bread?
Boppa put our 1734 farmhouse on the market.
The Border Patrol stopped every car leaving or entering the Keys.
“We seceded where others failed.”
Newspapers and television alike reported on the unprecedented “Border” roadblock within the United States itself. Expectant visitors canceled reservations to come to the Keys because the news said they wouldn’t get in.
I took another moving van of furniture north to North Puffin.
The City of Key West filed for an injunction in federal court but the court refused to enjoin the Border Patrol from treating the Keys like a foreign country.
The world press asked “What are you going to do, Mr. Mayor?”
“We are going to secede,” then-Mayor Dennis Wardlow replied.
Boppa auctioned some of the generations of family furniture (remember, we came from an old Quaker farm family that never threw anything away).
And on April 23, 1982, the Conch Republic raised its flag over city hall and the schooner Western Union attacked the US Coast Guard Cutter Diligence with water balloons, Conch fritters, and stale Cuban bread to begin the Great Battle of the Conch Republic.
The Diligence fought back with fire hoses.
Conchs valiantly fought the government forces to a draw and Prime Minister Wardlow surrendered.
Boppa bought a cute little 1968 cinderblock house here in South Puffin and the rest, as they say, is history.
33 years later, Conch patriots started celebrating the anniversary on Friday and will continue through Sunday, April 26. There will be a drag race on Duval Street, a sea battle featuring historic tall ships, a parade, and a bed race that may be “the most fun you can have in bed with your clothes on.”
33 years later, Boppa is gone but well-remembered and I shall hoist a Rolling Rock in honor of those who can be hoisted by a schooner with water balloons or a 61-year old man on a flying bicycle.
Blimps and Flying Bicycles
Have ye been wondering how a 61-year old postal carrier managed to land his flying bicycle on the Capitol lawn?
Me, too.
Police arrested Douglas Hughes after he steered his tiny gyrocopter onto the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol after flying right up the National Mall through the ultra-restricted airspace. He took off from Gettysburg which is more than an hour away from the no-fly zone over Washington. Apparently no one knew he was there until he landed.
Mr. Hughes had told the world he would do it by way of his website dedicated to this act of civil disobedience. He aimed to deliver 535 letters personally by “air mail” to members of Congress. “The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself,” Hughes wrote to the Tampa Bay Times. “I’m demanding reform and declaring a voter’s rebellion.”
The quotes from those parts of the government assigned to protect us tell us the real story, though.
“Oh, he flew under the radar.”
“Oh, our long guns would have shot him out of the sky had he gotten any closer.”
Let’s think about that.
He got within a few hundred feet of Congress. Long guns like the M107 can shoot a couple thousand yards.
How much closer did they want him?
And it turns out Mr. Hughes didn’t fly under the radar. There wasn’t any radar.
The Army’s “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System” is designed specifically to catch flying bicycles. This JLENS “aerostat radar system” will someday track boats, ground vehicles, cruise missiles, and manned and unmanned aircraft like gyrocopters. The system has two tethered helium/air mix blimps, armored mooring stations, radars, and a processing station designed to communicate with anti-missile and other ground and airborne systems. It was to have been deployed over the Capitol. It has a catchy name, anyway.
Sadly it isn’t out of “testing” yet.
Huh. They pointed this program at the Capitol about September 12, 2001, coming up 14 years ago but it started in back in 1996 which is darned near two decades now. A three-year exercise for one of the only two JLENS orbits is slated to begin sometime this year at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Contingent upon federal funding, of course.
You might recall that we decided to go to the Moon and do the other things on September 12, 1962. And Neil Armstrong took that small step on July 20, 1969, not quite half of 14 years later.
It gets worse.
We already had a Tethered Aerostat Radar System up and running in December, 1980 at Cudjoe Key, Florida.
1980.
And it ain’t even rocket science.
See that tethered Air Force Tethered Aerostat Radar System (the one that looks sooooooooo much like “JLENS”) was capable of detecting low flying objects and to track boats, ground vehicles, cruise missiles, and manned and unmanned aircraft like gyrocopters. Its primary mission has been to watch over counter-drug operations. Just having the blimp present used to deterred crime in the nations southernmost border. It has also proved a huge help to the US Coast Guard with drug interdiction through the years.
“Used to” because, after more than 30 years of service, all the TARS sites including Fat Albert were deflated due to cuts to the federal defense budget. And so the Army could develop JLENS.
But now we have 20 years and $2.78 billions in testing of “JLENS.”
Just another reason to wonder how good this government is at doing the other things they say they excel at.
“Change we can believe in”
has become
“Failure we can count on.”
“Taxes? We Don’t Pay No Steenkin’ Taxes”
Especially not today!
The Internal Revenue Service filed a tax lien in the Forsyth County Hall of Justice. That’s not too too unusual.
The IRS automatically has the lien as soon as it notifies a taxpayer of back taxes owed. If the taxpayer neglects or refuses to pay the debt on time, the IRS then files a Notice of Federal Tax Lien to alert creditors that the government has a legal right to all of that taxpayer’s property. All of it.
Robert De Niro was hit with an IRS lien for $6.4 million. Martin Scorsese for $2.85 million. Al Pacino for $188,000. Melissa Harris-Perry for about $70,000. These were for delinquent taxes.
Ms. Harris-Perry hosts MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry weekend morning show. She holds an endowed Presidential Chair in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at her alma mater, Wake Forest. In case you haven’t heard Ms. Harris-Perry on the air, here are a few quotes:
“American tourism will ruin Cuba.”
“The term ‘ObamaCare’ is racist.”
“Rich people don’t pay their fair share of taxes.”
We “plan to pay off [our outstanding] tax debt as quickly as possible.”
The Winston-Salem Journal reports that Ms. Harris-Perry said that she and her husband plan to pay off the rest of the tax debt as quickly as possible.
Oddly there were about 38,900 results in a Google news search for Ms. Harris-Perry. MSNBC is not listed in the search results as covering the story. Not once.
Odd?
She’s not the first MSNBC in dutch with the IRS. MSNBC darling the “Rev.” Al Sharpton also has more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens. Of course, Mr. Sharpton doesn’t pay anyone. Not travel agencies, not hotels, and especially not landlords. Seems like Mr. De Niro, Mr. Scorsese, Mr. Pacino, and Ms. Harris-Perry are more like Mr. Sharpton than we realized.
Wordless Wednesday
