Atlanta, GA

April 2, 2026

[NB: Previous installments in this series are here, here, and here]

When fear is fomented, the first thing most people do is panic. At least they did it in the right order.

Possibly excepting the Great Depression, the official response to covid was the biggest peacetime cataclysm in American history. It was certainly the largest “Public Health” calamity.

The scale and scope of the damage was unmatched. Like the Depression, covid was a government-induced disaster that permanently upended the world we’d known. No one was unaffected, and implications will reverberate far into the future.

It likely launched the Fourth Turning, the chaotic “winter” phase of historic cycles Strauss and Howe described three decades ago. This is a period of convulsion and upheaval, when war, riots, and economic collapse wipe away institutions that rose from the previous trough. As in earlier exigencies during the 1940s, 1860s, and 1770s, it’s characterized by persistent “emergencies” and perpetual crisis.

Roberta Modugno observed that since the sixteenth century, “exceptions to law and morality during a state of emergency seem to have become the ordinary practice of governments.” From 9/11… to the Financial Crisis… to covid… to the latest idiocy in the Middle East, that’s been the theme of the 21st Century.

This decade it’s been amplified, with the tone set from the moment it opened.

Burst Sewer Main

The Constitution doesn’t permit presidents (or any person or body in the U.S. government) to declare a “state of Emergency” to do whatever they want. “Public health” hacks have no authority to issue edicts regulating where people can go, what they must inject, or whether fabrics must cover their face.

Yet, like wastewater from a burst sewer main, authoritarian “guidelines”, restrictions, mandates, and directives poured forth to combat a bug, and did indelible damage without doing a damn bit of good.

Lives were ruined, yet deaths continued... often from causes misattributed to “covid”. Like the Times Square “Debt Clock”, they were relentlessly reported. Daily counts crawled morbidly beneath solemn anchors on the evening news.

But behind the headlines, the collateral carnage piled up (and continues to mount)…without benefit of televised tallies. At least a year of most people’s lives was ripped away, regardless their viral vulnerability or risk tolerance.

Loneliness spread, depression soared, unemployment flourished, opportunities vanished, careers stalled, and suicides spiked. Cancers went unscreened and heart disease undetected. Loved ones were told to stay apart. Elderly relatives died alone.

How many early deaths resulted, or will be caused in coming years? Who knows? But few will be attributed to covid policy, or receive a moment of silence… except from perpetrators who’d prefer we forget.

And for what? Countless charts documented covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among and within most every state, county, country, and town. Within or across regions, rates rose or fell almost simultaneously or in tandem, regardless the prescribed policy. None of “mitigation measures” seemed to mitigate anything, except the normal pleasures of daily life.

Lockdowns were always counter-productive, cruel, and lethal. They precipitated loneliness, inflation, high anxiety, deep depression, and a proliferation of drugs, shootings, suicides, and unattributed diseases that weren’t detected or diagnosed.

“Mitigation measures” hit societies like a sledgehammer. Relative vulnerability was routinely ignored. The young and the healthy were treated as if they were old and infirm. In a perverse inversion, children were forced to sacrifice for their elders. Schools closed when nursing homes were sealed. It was like giving everyone chemo to protect a few from cancer.

In most states, these top-down, one-size fits all approaches were applied to a virus that was unusually transparent about who it afflicted. But data was irrelevant and science didn’t matter. Healthy people were redefined as “asymptomatic”, implying everyone was ill and all were lethal.

How Science Works

The worst realization of the covid era was how acquiescent the American people were in surrendering their rights. I wouldn’t have thought it could be so easy.

For perceived “safety”, Americans quickly yielded or diluted even what we’d think matters most. Church, school, travel, family gatherings, friendly dinners, irreplaceable moments in a child’s life, and the last ones in an adult’s.

To the extent these activities remained, many were diluted by “distancing”, carved by plexiglass, or relegated to “virtual events”. The sterility of Zoom replaced the vitality of life.

Neighbor turned against neighbor. Families divided. Friendships were lost. As people were trained to treat their fellow men as disease vectors, suspicion rose, trust eroded, and the fabric of society frayed.

Social gatherings, even employment, became contingent on whether we’d consumed an experimental drug. Dissenters were precluded from work, banned from businesses, excluded from school, or prohibited from entering most establishments.

Millions applauded this apartheid, shunning skeptics as anti-science, grandma-killing vermin. After all, “The Science” said so.

But that’s not how science works. As with any diagnosis or scientific evaluation, the role of “expert” is to assess the situation, provide perspective, and offer suggestions.

Yet determining what to do is an individual philosophical decision, not a collective medical one. It’s not the role of “public health” bureaucrats to require remedies for millions of “patients” they’ve never met.

Yet most Americans went along. They wore masks, took their medicine, kept six feet apart, followed floor arrows on grocery store aisles… and tattled on neighbors who defied the farce.

It was as if we were trapped a giant Kafka novel, with scenes choreographed by Heironymus Bosch. It seemed like it would go on forever. And it might have, had Vladimir Putin not cured covid by changing the subject.

Balalaika from Borscht

When Russian tanks rolled west, the propaganda did a pirouette. A Wall Street expression has it that if everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking at all. This phenomenon is obvious in recent years, when unanimous brains idled in mindless unison.

Moral indignation shifted from demonizing covid dissidents to renouncing Russia. Ukraine flag emojis replaced syringe images. Several hundred replicas of this foreign flag fluttered in Congress!

Among bystanders who couldn’t distinguish a balalaika from borscht, bursts of blue and yellow became the new face masks, implying that anyone not displaying them must be indifferent or ignorant.

But about multi-faceted conflicts in distant lands between people we’ll never meet, it’s OK to be ambivalent. In fact, it’s probably smart. After all, if incessant meddlers minded their own business, most foreign fiascos wouldn’t arise. Had the US government stayed on its side of the ocean, this one wouldn’t have.

Hunk of Meat

Albeit to a lesser degree than many countries that were completely made up, the Ukraine is an amorphous construct. Even its modern Slavonic name means “on the edge”, what Americans might call a “frontier”.

As with Poland or the Punjab, it’s historically been a hunk of meat buzzed by hungry flies, and regularly contested by rival dogs. Over the centuries, Russians, Ottomans, and Mongols tugged it east, whereas Poles, Austrians, and Americans pulled it west.

On occasion, the hounds drop the slab, show their teeth, and turn on each other. Which is why canines from distant neighborhoods should stay on their leash.

The Ukraine is not merely a breadbasket of Europe. It’s its cradle. It’s the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. It’s also the fertile crib of Mother Russia.

In a mirror image of Cuba sixty years ago, the Russians consider the Ukraine to be within their sphere of influence. For some reason, the Americans insist it’s part of their own.

It’s possible neither are right. But the Americans are certainly wrong. The US has no business being anywhere near the Ukraine.

Poking the Bear

Almost twenty percent of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, and forty percent are culturally Russian. When the Soviet Union was founded, the heavily Russian Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk were appended to eastern Ukraine. A few decades later, Khrushchev added another one when he gifted Crimea.

At the time, these decisions seemed relatively inconsequential since these were all Soviet territory, and no Soviet leader thought the empire would collapse. But when the USSR dissolved, the Ukraine went free. When it did, the US assured the Russians that NATO would move no further east.

Murray Rothbard said we can’t be sure a government did something until it’s been officially denied. The same can’t be said of government promises. We know those are lies the minute they’re uttered.

Within the decade, Poland, the Czechs, and Hungary had joined NATO. Five years later, Baltic states were accepted. Despite American assurances, an Atlantic alliance that lost its reason to exist had made its way to Russia’s door.

For eight years the US kept pumping illegal weapons to its Ukrainian puppets, who used them to wage war on Russians in the east. The West spent a decade poking the bear. In February of 2022, it finally woke up.

In response, the Biden Administration funneled billions to its satrap, weaponized the dollar, and attacked Germany by destroying the Russian pipeline that supplied its gas.

By sanctioning Russia, stealing its assets, and evicting it from SWIFT, the U.S. government sent a signal that the dollar system wasn’t safe. Countries took notice, backed away from the buck, traded directly, and bought more gold. Too few Americans followed their lead.

“Mostly Peaceful” Violence

While the US government caused its usual carnage overseas, the home-front was rife with rent-a-riots stoking racial grievance. After a deranged criminal overdosed in Minneapolis (and while most Americans were kept home to avoid a virus), dozens of cities simultaneously erupted in “mostly peaceful” violence.

Although a black man died in a northern state, Confederate monuments were toppled across the South. Predictably, the Jacobins soon targeted the founding fathers. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from New York City Hall. By definition, anyplace that doesn’t welcome Thomas Jefferson isn’t America.

While the culture was being erased, its people were being ripped off. Covid spending and war welfare accelerated price increases to rates unseen since the 1970s. Government debt increased six-fold this century. It’s doubled again this decade.

Such Orwellian monstrosities as the “Inflation Reduction Act”, “American Rescue Act”, and “Big Beautiful Bill” were “paid for” by counterfeiting the currency, which slowly impoverishes Americans by siphoning purchasing power.

Hundreds of billions were laundered thru the Ukraine. But that’s chicken feed. During the first year of covid, almost $7T (!) were fabricated to enrich connected corporations and convince the masses to stay cooped-up.

Yet the exterior gates were flung wide open. For decades, U.S. meddling wreaked havoc across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, sending hordes streaming toward the turnstiles that once served as Western borders. The US and Europe were overrun.

In the midst of the “pandemic”, millions of invaders were welcomed in. Many were chaperoned by state-sponsored NGOs that distributed human contraband around the country.

Attempts to oust them are met with outcries. Even requiring citizenship to vote or be included in the census is too much to ask. Since the start of this century, many states are demographically unrecognizable. The chaos and division by which we’re fraught was the inevitable (and perhaps intended) result.

Succored Snake

Mayhem isn’t limited to the US “homeland”. Like the Japanese incursion to Manchuria, the Ukraine war looks like the overture to a tragic opera with many acts. Another opened the next year in the Levant.

There’s a misperception that rancor between Muslim and Jew goes back centuries. But before the 20th century, they got along relatively well. Jews were a small minority in the region, but mostly lived as they pleased.

Antagonism built after construction of the Suez Canal, when European Zionists started infiltrating Palestine. Over decades, Arab property owners were ousted. After the Second World War the state of Israel was established.

For eighty years, fighting continued as Israel kept cleansing. Wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 strengthened Israel’s grasp on Palestinian land. As Russia was provoked to respond in the Ukraine, Palestinians were incited to fight back.

Through years of Intifada and resistance, they did. Having once held all the territory Israel now claims, they were resigned to begging for their own state. The Likud Party resisted, and surreptitiously funded unsavory organizations to discredit potential negotiating partners.

After years propping Hamas, Israel was bit by the snake it succored. The attack of October 7, 2023 was horrific, the deadliest day in Israel’s history. Almost 1,200 were killed and 250 held hostage.

The barbarity became a convenient (perhaps too convenient?) excuse to annihilate the Gaza Strip. The obliteration has continued since, with civilians targeted, most buildings demolished, and perhaps a hundred thousand killed. This atrocity has all the earmarks of a genocide. And anyone who objected was automatically “antisemitic”.

The Last Country

Israel sometimes refers to 10/7 as its 9/11. In a way it was. Both tragedies became handy reasons to launch wars Zionists long wanted.

About twenty years ago, General Wesley Clark revealed that after 9/11 the Department of Defense had a plan to “take out” seven countries in five years. On the list were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan… all of which have since been destroyed.

But the seventh country was the one Israel most wanted removed. Five weeks ago, at Israel’s behest, the Trump Administration attacked Iran. This war will one day warrant it’s own retrospective. But it seems safe to say it was lost the moment it was launched, particularly because of the reason it was.

Allegiance to “allies” is the flawed rationale that produced the First World War, the most consequential cataclysm in human history. Let’s hope that when this latest fiasco is finished, it still will be.

JD

Atlanta, GA
January 19, 2026

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first time a holiday honored Martin Luther King.

In 1983, the third Monday in January was designated by the US government as the official annual recurrence. It took effect three years later. Over the ensuing decade-and-a-half, states adopted the day at varying rates and to different degrees.

The effort to establish this holiday began soon after King’s assassination, and was quite contentious… even after President Reagan signed the enabling legislation.

Many of the challenges were euphemistic diversions to distract from undeniable racial resistance. Yet even if the stated objections are acknowledged as legitimate (and some were), these considerations do not detract from King’s considerable courage or his commendable commitment to a righteous cause.

These characteristics and accomplishments are more than worthy of remembrance, respect, and honor. All men are flawed. Obviously, the purpose of this day… as with any occasion dedicated to an imperfect person… is to recall the virtues unique to one man, not the vices he shares with many.

Lighting the Fuse

My grandfather, as Executive Vice President of National City Lines, bore direct witness to King’s courage.

The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was established the afternoon of December 5, 1955, with Martin Luther King chosen as its leader. The organization formed in the wake of Rosa Parks refusing to yield her seat four days earlier, and after a successful bus boycott earlier that morning. But the fuse was lit years before.

When blacks were told to sit in the back of the bus, they weren’t simply consigned to seats in the rear. It was more degrading than that. They first had to go to the front, and pay their fare. They then had to step off the bus, walk to the back, and re-board.

One rainy day in 1943, as she did most mornings, Rosa Parks approached the bus. But on this occasion, she tried something different. She paid her fare, and immediately sought a seat. The driver ordered her to get off the bus and re-board in the back, in accordance with the city ordinance.

Parks complied. She retreated from the front, and stepped onto the wet pavement. She then walked in the rain to the rear door, where she prepared to board. Then, before she could do so… the bus drove away.

A dozen years later, on the fateful day for which she’s famous, Rosa Parks again approached the bus. The driver was the same man who had stranded her twelve years earlier.

Parks took the front seat of the “colored” section, but was told to move when the “white” rows filled and additional whites boarded. She refused. We all know what happened next.

The Bus Boycott

The MIA would orchestrate an ongoing boycott as part of a broader mission to “improve race relations… and uplift the tenor of the community.” The boycott would persist until their demands were met.

These conditions, as spelled out in a letter King wrote to National City Lines, were: courteous treatment by bus drivers, first-come-first-served seating, and employment of black bus operators in predominantly black neighborhoods.

During the ensuing year, the MIA organized weekly gatherings to keep the black population energized, and daily carpools to keep them mobile.

At the meetings, attendees would pass the plate to sustain the boycott and finance legal challenges to city ordinances that segregated the buses.

Meanwhile, to stifle their efforts, the city deemed the carpools illegal because the private cars weren’t properly licensed. It also pressured insurance companies not to cover vehicles involved in the carpool. Black taxi drivers, who supported the boycott by reducing their rates to match the regular bus fare, were fined if they dropped their price.

King was relatively new to Montgomery and, according to Parks, was chosen to lead the MIA in part because he had yet to accumulate local enemies. That was about to change.

The month after the association was formed, his house was firebombed while his wife and young child were in it.

Fortunately, neither were (physically) injured. But King’s admonishment to the crowd that gathered at his house just after the explosion… that they “love our enemies”… cemented his reputation for non-violent resistance.

The Bus Company

National City Lines operated in cities around the country, so wanted no part of heated municipal controversies. This concern was particularly acute in Montgomery, where my grandfather tasked his Vice President, Ken Totten, with navigating not only the sudden boycott, but also the process of obtaining a new franchise from the city government.

Company President Roy Fitzgerald deferred to my grandfather in disputes with complicated legal elements, such as the one that materialized in Montgomery, Alabama.

My grandfather joined National City Lines in 1938. Born in Anderson, South Carolina, raised in Augusta, Georgia, and recipient of both a Bachelor and a Law degree from the University of Georgia, he had a Southern pedigree that was beyond reproach. Fitzgerald assumed that such a background would help his Northern company traverse this tricky Dixie terrain.

Based on recorded accounts… and my memory of what he told me… my grandfather assured King that the bus company had no desire to offend its customers, and was willing to work with him. Yet segregation was mandated not by the company, but by the state, so National City Lines could not unilaterally lift it.

King was empathetic… yet emphatic. He understood the bus line didn’t make the rules. But he also knew it had influence. That the influence would come from outside the insular realm of municipal Montgomery, from those not protective of local social status, could be of considerable benefit.

For his rôle in the boycott and instigating the carpools, King was indicted. Rather than wait to be arrested, he surrendered voluntarily, and spent two weeks in jail. This brought national attention, outside pressure and, within six months, a district court ruling that Alabama’s segregated bus laws were unconstitutional.

A couple days after the ruling took effect, a shotgun shattered the front door of King’s house. Bombings and beatings of local blacks escalated in coming months and years.

Montgomery passed new orders requiring or reinforcing segregation. Even aboard the buses, despite the court order, fear and fatigue had returned most blacks to the back.

A Way of Life

My grandfather told me these stories several years before he died. Till then, I was unaware of his rôle in the boycotts… or that he even had one. His admiration for King was clear in retrospect, but I imagine his feelings were more ambivalent at the time. If so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

He was a white businessman with southern roots. He was also an executive at a northern company with national reach. He was balancing the constraints of local law, his obligations to his corporation, and the perspectives that derived from his upbringing and surroundings.

He lived in Chicago when the boycott unfolded, but segregation was a way of life in many places. The South enshrined it officially in law; the North did so effectively in custom.

Hearing him recollect the events in Montgomery from the distance of decades, I honestly think my grandfather did the best he could. In many instances, he did better than most.

My uncle informed me that at one point the head of the Alabama Public Service Commission… who also led the White Citizens Council (known otherwise as the KKK)… wrote my grandfather and ordered him to segregate the buses. In “polite legalese”, as my uncle put it, my grandfather replied with a suggestion that the commissioner stick his request somewhat further to the rear than the back of a bus.

A few years after the boycotts, my grandfather joined Martin Luther King for a visit to the offices of the local newspaper in Mobile, Alabama. King wanted more black drivers, and my grandfather was in agreement.

But the policy could be successfully implemented only if it weren’t heavily publicized. Being a white southerner, my grandfather was better positioned than King to make that case to the local publisher.

He did so, and the paper agreed not to print news of the hirings. They soon proceeded, and were successful… owing to the absence of what would otherwise have been a harsh backlash.

Empathetic Credit

It’s easy to look back from the safety of our own time and think we would have done things differently than our ancestors did in theirs. I doubt it.

Why would we? Most people at the time didn’t. What makes us so special? Who do we think we are? After all, look around. I think we will have plenty to answer for when our grandchildren reflect on us.

Would I have done any better in Montgomery than my grandfather did? I don’t know, but I have no reason to think so.

I think he actually did pretty well. It’s easy to oppose segregation in 2025. In 1956, even (or especially) among whites, doing so invited a firebomb in your kid’s bedroom.

More importantly, cultural attitudes were radically different, and were deeply embedded. Such ingrained perspectives, repulsive as we might find them, take time to change.

Our predecessors changed theirs, and for that they deserve our empathetic credit rather than our supercilious condemnation. But they would not have done so without the courage and commitment of those… like Martin Luther King… who risked, and gave, their lives to effect that transformation.

My grandfather was a great man. Understandably, such men have faith in their judgment and confidence in their opinions. They don’t change them easily. After all, those are in large measure what got them where they are.

But they are also not impervious to influence, particularly when it comes from other great men. In Montgomery, my grandfather met such a man, and associated with him for several years.

He said that he liked Dr King, that he was a good man and easy to work with. Slowly, perhaps imperceptibly… and possibly in ways he recognized only in the clear hindsight of later years… Martin Luther King influenced him.

As he did all of us.

JD

Tampa, FL

December 24, 2025

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

– Christina Rossetti and Gustav Holst: In the Bleak Mid-Winter

The search for universal essence began…like so many things…in ancient Greece, on the shores of Ionia.

The first philosophers sought the primary substance that sustains the world…what St. John later called The Word, which was “in the beginning with God”, without which “nothing was made that was made.”

Thales thought this animating element was water. Anaximenes assumed it was air. And Heraclitus hypothesized for fire. But more important than them positing answers is that they asked the question.

Philosophy, like mythology, is a quest…a pursuit for enduring answers and timeless truth. The questions, and the quest, continued for six centuries…around the Mediterranean, into the reign of Augustus.

Then an Answer was found where no one was looking: below a star and under the earth, by humble shepherds and wise Magi, in a small cave beneath Bethlehem.

Earthly eyes that for centuries searched outward through darkness looked inward to the Light. As Chesterton put it, “the God who’d been a circumference became a center.”

Word of The Word spread throughout Palestine and around the sea…from the cave, thru the catacombs, to the cathedrals.

Across the Roman realm…as with Saturnalia to Christmas, or hearth deities to patron saints…adherents deftly adapted pagan customs to Christian belief, and conquered an empire. Rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater, they wisely kept both, and (to again quote Chesterton) used the bathwater to baptize the baby.

The Chef d’œuvre of the World

To Christians, today is a new Creation: the sacred signing ceremony of a cosmic refinancing. We are the paper, God the pen, and the Child the ink.

The Incarnation is the fulcrum in time and the chef d’œuvre of the world. It’s arguably the most important event in history.

But it’s not the only historic one to occur on this date. In fact, it almost certainly didn’t occur on this date.

We don’t know precisely when Christ was born. It wasn’t till Constantine converted to Christianity and co-opted pagan practices that December 25 was decreed to be Christmas.

It’s traditionally a festive occasion, but a quiet day. Stores are closed, performances are paused, and mail doesn’t move. ‘Tis the season for bulls and bears to let bygones by bygones, as we relax and rejoice with family and friends.

A Mixed Bag

But not everyone enjoys a Yuletide lull. Some holiday happenings don’t huddle at home, or on the bottom corner of the back page. Occasionally, they hop into the history books.

Some shenanigans that occurred at Christmas…like the Federal Reserve Act or bombing of North Vietnam…have been fraudulent or heinous. Others, as when the Soviet Union collapsed, were welcome and warranted.

Like a pile of random presents under a community tree, it’s a mixed bag. Let’s open a few, and get a glimpse at some grand moments on Christmas Day.

Christendom Consolidated

At the turn of the ninth century, the King of the Franks crossed the Alps. The year before, the Bishop of Rome had gone the other way. In each instance, Cross and Crown were trying to preserve the realm and protect the Faith.

For the Feast of the Nativity, a large crowd gathered at St. Peter’s in Rome, where the Vicar of Christ was to consecrate the king’s son. But as the king rose from prayer, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head, and acclaimed him the “new Augustus.”

From that moment, Charlemagne was Holy Roman Emperor, and the Church affirmed its authority to recognize rulers. On Christmas Day in the year 800, Christendom was consolidated.

The Carolingian Renaissance (such as it was) united Europe in an interlude of cultural, educational, and religious revival. But as so often happens when a father plants promising seeds, what actually sprouted were wayward weeds.

Charlemagne’s successors made a mess of things. The next couple centuries, the Franks fell on hard times. The Norseman descended, and gave their name to the north of France.

Captured Conquerors

But they wanted more. In 1066, their duke took a fleet across the channel to attack the Angles and take their throne. After winning the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror was crowned King of England on Christmas Day.

The French language embellished the tongue of the native tribes. But before long, the conquered locals had captured their conquerors, and the Franks in Britain became English.

Over the centuries, their descendants grew restless. Some of them crossed the ocean, and created colonies.

Within a couple hundred years, the Mother Country persisted in pushing them around. So they decided to push back…by walking away.

But the British decided to stop their secession and teach them a lesson. They hired some Hessians to help them do it. On Christmas Day in 1776, several of those German mercenaries were huddled at quarters in the town of Trenton.

From the other side of the Delaware, George Washington decided to attack. Under cover of darkness and thru chunks of ice, his ragtag army crossed the river. The Americans took Trenton.

They were unable to hold it. But their Christmas surprise turned the tide, while reinforcing the depleted troops with captured supplies.

The war raged five more years before the British reluctantly relinquished their erstwhile colonies. But over the next few decades, they’d continue to get on each others’ nerves.

In 1812, they fought again, this time in a perfectly pointless war. That skirmish ended two years later, with a treaty signed on (when else?) Christmas Eve in the town of Ghent.

A Hallowed Night in Hell

But it was on another Christmas, a century to the day after the Treaty of Ghent, that an impromptu truce redeemed the world.

Few activities are more incongruous with Christmas than armed conflict. The best battles are ones that aren’t fought, especially in the middle of a worthless war. And none were more useless than World War I.

“The Great War” was supposed to be easy. When they shipped out in August, enlistees thought they’d be home for the holidays. Most who were came back in a box.

Along the western front, soldiers who survived those first few months were packed in pestilential trenches, slaughtering similar men who’d done them no harm.

On the eve of their first Christmas in that God-forsaken inferno, the guns were silent as a chill settled in. Thru the darkness, Allied soldiers heard an inspiring sound from the German line. Recognizing a sacred hymn honoring that holy night, the English and French reciprocated with carols of their own.

From either side of “no man’s land”, wary servicemen invited their “enemy” to cross. With tentative trust and an abundance of caution, they met in the middle. Hands were shaken, greetings were exchanged, and cigarettes were shared.

Before long, corks were popped, soccer was played, and humanity paid homage to the Prince of Peace.

Similar scenes graced the barbed-wire front that scarred France from the Belgian border to the Swiss frontier. Of their own volition, these wretched warriors decided for a day to defy their orders.

On a hallowed night in a theater of Hell, they reminded the world we’re all still human. Perhaps that inferno wasn’t forsaken after all.

Little Moments

Many big moments have occurred on Christmas, including the biggest of all. But often it’s the little moments that matter most.

Christmas is the linchpin of history, the keystone of our calendar. In the Nativity, the Story and the Word become One. Today the Poet enters His poem, the Artist enters His painting, and the Author enters His book.

It’s a time when many of us return where our own stories began, to be with those thru whom it continues. For a few days, we gather with kith and kin, and exalt in the blessings of our indelible bonds.

In the upper hemisphere it’s bleak mid-winter. But while the weather outside is frightful, conditions could always be worse. We could be crossing an icy river on a rickety raft, or stuck in some forlorn trench for no reason at all. Or, like too many Americans, we could be deep in debt, camped on a sidewalk, or missing another meal.

The more fortunate among us are huddled with hot coffee by a warm fire. Trees shelter packages, cellars stock wine, and ovens offer feasts.

But Christmas is special not because of gifts, but for the presence. Even where crowds are small, hearths are happy amid those we love, among whom the coziest Christmases are the most meaningful of all.

JD

Bath, Maine

November 11, 2025

In the small villages of France few families were spared. Monuments in the centers of most every town record the names of “Nos Heros…Mort Pour La France…”

On repeated visits to Paris, Provence, and the valleys of the Rhône and the Loire during the early years of this century, I was humbled and mortified by these marble, stone, or metal reminders of an unnecessary, avoidable four-year onslaught that butchered and damned the Lost Generation.

Today marks the 107th anniversary of the Armistice that took effect the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month…the merciful end of the “war to end all wars”.

Bloodshed, Debt, and Disillusion

Of the monumental catastrophes of the 20th Century, the suicide of the West known as the First World War - mother of the others - was perhaps the worst…if not for its horrific scale, then for its malignant scope and pervasive impact.

More British, French, and Italian soldiers died in the First World War than in the second. France suffered over one million casualties in the first four months. By the time the United States intervened, the average life expectancy of a soldier at the front was three weeks.

Crackpot politicians, utopian fantasy, and both arms of the military-financial complex joined hands with the last refuge of scoundrels to butcher almost 20 million souls, bankrupt the economies that buried them, and consign their heirs to a century of bloodshed, debt, and disillusion.

Parental hands that in August 1914 embraced their sons as they boarded trains in Leeds, Leipzig, and Lyons resorted over the next four years to nervously clutching cigarettes, quickly unfolding maps, and apprehensively tracing contours of the Marne, Somme, and Rhine.

Soon thereafter, those fingers would receive telegrams, roll up the maps, uncork whiskey bottles, and clutch black cloth, crosses, and rosary beads.

The Lesson of Sarajevo

As much as we’re lectured about the “Lessons of Munich” every time some tin-pot waves a sling-shot, we should recall the Lesson of Sarajevo whenever one of our meddling Caesars encourages us not to mind our own business.

Ignorance increases by the square of the distance, in time and space, from the events under contemplation. Half a world from Washington, DC…on the steppes of Europe, in the Taiwan Strait, or along the eastern Mediterranean…conflicts dating back decades or centuries are exposing arrogant ignorance on the banks of the Potomac.

As Richard Whatley reminded us, those who are unaware of their ignorance will be misled by their knowledge. On that basis, with incoherent “alliances”, foolish tripwires, and reckless war guarantees, our illustrious “leaders” are steering us astray.

Unless courses are quickly corrected, the Lesson of Sarajevo implies where we’re headed. Prior to and during (and since) the diabolical calamity Europe endured after the summer of 1914, ignorance flourished and mis-applied knowledge abounded.

Final Flight

Eddie Rickenbacker, commander of the 94th Aero-squadron during the Great War (and eventual founder and chairman of Eastern Airlines afterward) recounted his effort to reduce his ignorance the day the guns fell silent.

He and other commanders learned the evening of the 10th that an impending Armistice, effective 11a the next morning, would come from talks underway at Compiegne, and that all flights that day would be grounded.

Under pretense of an “engine check”, Rickenbacker asked that his plane be started, and as the sun rose on the 11th he flew surreptitiously toward the Western Front. Low enough to draw German fire, he also could easily make out the distinctive uniforms…and even some faces…of the opposing soldiers still firing from their pestilential trenches.

At the appointed hour the cease fire obtained, and from the air Rickenbacker could see former combatants emerge from their filthy ruts…first tentatively, then enthusiastically, and finally in tearful gratitude…traversing no-man’s land to mingle with and embrace the scarred, tired, hungry, young husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons they’d never met, yet who for four years had been told they must kill.

As the men approached each other, Rickenbacker, describing himself as “the only audience member of the greatest show on earth”, saw the artificial animosity melt, the different uniforms merge, and their distinct colors blend into a single mass of universal, joyous…and genuine…humanity.

Their lives - spared yet seared - would never be the same. Nor would their world…or ours.

Knowing death is near would seem to be clarifying. After directly confronting that looming specter, things become either very important, or not important at all.

Perspective and appreciation likely come into sharper relief. Even thinking about the nightmare of the First World War sharpens my gratitude that I’ve not endured such a pointless cauldron, and amplifies prayers that current events aren’t pulling us into the pot.

We all have challenges, conflicts, and choices that in the moment seem monumental and gut-wrenching, or appear insurmountable or of lasting consequence.

Considering the unspeakable torment of those unfortunate millions whom Armistice Day then spared or now commemorates, we are humbled into realizing that many of our pressing concerns are fleeting…and may not be as important or impactful as we might have thought.

And perhaps they never were.

JD

Atlanta, GA

October 27, 2025

“I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an engineer--

A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer.

Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear.

I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.

Oh! If I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold,

And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold!

But if I had a son, sir, I’ll tell you what he’d do--

He would yell, ‘To hell with Georgia!’ like his daddy used to do.

- “Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”

This weekend we were back at Georgia Tech, joining a swarm of Yellow Jackets revisiting the hive for Homecoming.

This month marks the 140th anniversary of the Institute’s establishment. Originally the “Georgia School of Technology”, the college arose to spur Southern engineering, science, and industry after the War Between the States.

Its mission emphasized theory and “practice”, which entailed students producing consumer goods to help fund the venture. Derisively dubbed the “North Avenue Trade School” by its in-state adversaries at the “Athens Community College”, Tech defused the insult by embracing it.

Why not?

Among the best ways a college can distinguish itself from most universities is to ensure graduates can do something useful when they get out. And make no mistake… that’s the ultimate goal of every Tech student:

To “get out”.

The degree is great, but primarily because it represents release… like an honorable discharge from remnants of the Grand Armée that returned from Russia.

Outward and Upward

Upon completion, the Victorian Tech Tower prompted Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady to proclaim it “a light that will cast its beams over all the South. So lighted, we can move into the industrial future.”

The Tower reflected a style architectural firm Bruce and Morgan perpetuated at Auburn, Clemson, and Agnes Scott during the same decade.

On the site of a stillborn suburb donated by Richard Peters, Georgia Tech originally occupied four acres along North Avenue, a street that denoted the northern limit of Atlanta. Confederate fortifications once lined the road, and on the site of the current campus the city surrendered to Sherman after those defenses failed to hold.

For six decades Tech continued to grow. In the wake of the Second World War, to reflect rapid expansion and enhanced emphasis on all aspects of engineering discipline and scientific research, the school was renamed The Georgia Institute of Technology in 1948… sixty years after it initially opened.

The campus spread northwest from Tech Tower, filling a footprint a hundred times larger than the original plot Peters provided. In recent decades it’s moved east, pouring further outward and upward… bursting its banks to nourish Atlanta like the Nile.

Recognized as among the three best engineering universities, a top ten research institution (the highest ranked without a medical school), and the greatest return on investment of any public college in America, Georgia Tech offers about forty undergraduate majors and more than 100 post-graduate programs.

At the turn of the 20th century, it featured only five. Degrees in civil, electrical, textile, and chemical engineering were added to the mechanical engineering major offered when the school opened.

A dozen years later, an Evening School of Commerce offered classes at an off-site location that would eventually become Georgia State University. In 1919, Anna Teitelbaum Wise received a degree from that college, becoming the first alumna from Georgia Tech.

Thirty-three years after Wise got her diploma, Diane Michel and Elizabeth Herndon enrolled as undergraduates, albeit restricted to programs not offered by other schools. Four years later, in 1956, Michel and Shirley Clements became the first female graduates from the Georgia Tech campus.

Tech Traditions

Like most institutions of higher learning, Georgia Tech boasts unique traditions.

Some… like inordinate stress leading to liver failure, or having girls from Agnes Scott wander campus to fool prospective students into thinking the female “Ratio” is reasonable… are overstated or flat-out false.

Others were true… like “Drownproofing”, stealing a “T” from atop Tech Tower, or telling incoming freshman to glance at students on either side because only one of the three would still be at Tech in four years.

These days, those customs are anachronistic. Drownproofing (binding ankles together and wrists behind the back, then tossing students into water and wishing them luck) was discontinued the year after I started (tho’ is still used to train Navy Seals), and “T” thieves are now slapped with expulsion rather than on the wrist.

And the “look to your left, look to your right” routine would no longer make sense. Almost every student (~95%) who enters Tech now “gets out” with a degree.

Not because it’s easier to get out. But because it’s harder to get in. Seeing the quality of current students, many of us who returned this weekend doubted we could do it.

We were like a meet-up of inmates who tricked a sympathetic parole board into setting us free. Now we couldn’t convince them to let us in.

Only about 5,000 spots are available for almost 70,000 applicants. Those who can’t make it thru are unlikely to be admitted at all.

Yet for almost a century, one student has made it every year.

George P. Burdell

First enrolled in 1927, illustrious alum George P. Burdell is purported by haters to be apocryphal. But that’s because, like Zelig or Forrest Gump, he’s been everywhere.

High school student Ed Smith was a student at Richmond Academy in Augusta (which my grandfather contemporaneously attended).

After receiving two applications to Georgia Tech, Smith submitted both… the second under the fictitious moniker of George P. Burdell. When Smith was accepted, Burdell came too.

Smith enrolled his phantom friend in every class he took. With assistance from accomplices, Smith completed duplicate assignments and exams for each of his courses, and Burdell earned a degree in 1930.

Burdell couldn’t get enough. He briefly studied at Harvard, and received a Master’s Degree from Tech. He’s earned several since.

He’s enrolled in every Tech class at least three times. In 1969, when the administration computerized enrollment to keep “Burdell” from registering, students hacked the system and signed him up for every class Tech offered.

Like Captain Tuttle in “MASH”, Burdell joined the military during the Second World War. Until an officer who’d graduated from Tech recognized the name, Burdell was on each log of a B-17 that’d flown twelve bombing missions over Europe.

The Georgia State Senate honored him in 2015 for being “an upstanding citizen”, recognized for his accomplishments and contributions to Georgia Tech and the state of Georgia.

From the late 1960s to early 1980s, Mad Magazine listed Burdell as being on their Board of Directors.

In 2001, with 57% of the vote, Burdell was leading candidate for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, till editors realized who he wasn’t and removed him from the running.

During the 1950s, The Atlanta Journal announced his engagement to “Anna Cartwright” of Agnes Scott College. In 2006, Garrison Keillor acknowledged their 50th wedding anniversary on Prairie Home Companion (at the 1:13:54 mark).

Ramblin’ Wreck

Tech is perhaps best known for its famous fight song. The “Ramblin’ Wreck” ostensibly referred to make-shift jalopies built by Georgia Tech engineers for use on projects in South American jungles.

It’s since become a 1930 Ford Model A coupe that (among other things) leads the team onto the gridiron as part of the pomp before each game.

Based on a Scottish drinking song, the lyrics were apparently written by a Tech football player while traveling to an 1893 game at Auburn. Other attributions are to a member of the original Tech graduating class or to a skirmish during an early baseball game against the University of Georgia.

Tech adopted the tune as its fight song in 1905. Three years later, it was published in The Blueprint yearbook. Under the headline “What Causes Whitlock to Blush”, the words “hell” and “helluva” were decorously omitted.

The Tech band played the song in the melody of “Son of a Gambolier”. By 1919, that version was embellished and copyrighted. It quickly caught on, and entered popular culture.

Tech graduate Arthur Murray opened his first dance studio a few blocks from campus, at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. As a student, Murray created the first “radio dance”, which featured the fight song.

The “Ramblin’ Wreck” received increasing prominence the next few decades, culminating in the Tech Glee Club singing it on the Ed Sullivan, Nixon allegedly playing it for Khrushchev at the “Kitchen Debate”, and Gregory Peck strumming it in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

The song has been played a lot lately. The football team has won its first eight games, including the Homecoming victory a couple days ago.

Georgia Tech has exceeded this threshold only four times: in 1966 (9-0), and the Championship seasons of 1952 (12-0), 1928 (10-0) and 1917 (9-0). It matched it in 1916, when John Heisman coached the team that clobbered Cumberland State 222-0.

The most lopsided victory in college football history may seem vindictive and gratuitous. Because it was.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t warranted.

Cumberland had recently used professional players to put a 22-0 pasting on the Tech baseball team that Heisman also coached. Heisman wanted revenge and… like Alexander at Tyre… he wasn’t shy about exacting retribution.

He got it.

Most Honorable Win

Despite boasting four National Championships (with legitimate claims on three more) and playing in the oldest on-campus stadium (which has witnessed the most home wins) in major college football, Georgia Tech’s team has finished unblemished by loss or tie only three times.

Among Tech’s more honorable victories was the 1956 Sugar Bowl. Not because the team won (it did, 7-0), but because it played.

Governor Marvin Griffin prohibited Tech from participating because Pittsburgh fielded a black player. Students revolted, marched to the Governor’s Mansion, and burned the Chief Executive in effigy.

Running on a segregationist platform, Griffin didn’t relent. But a reluctant Board of Regents (which initially supported Griffin) did. After Georgia Tech President Blake Van Leer appealed to them, they voted to overrule the governor, and send Tech to the Sugar Bowl.

Cynics may suggest racial solidarity wasn’t the main motive for Tech’s stance. The team wanted to play, the school wanted money, and students didn’t want to pass up a party.

Maybe.

But everything in Van Leer’s career suggests he was sincere. He even threatened to quit if the Regents didn’t override the governor:

“Either we’re going to the Sugar Bowl or you can find yourself another damn president of Georgia Tech.”

The Regents voted with Van Leer. Unfortunately, Tech would need a new president anyway. Van Leer died several weeks after the game he ensured everyone would win.

Four years later, students voted to admit qualified black applicants to Georgia Tech. In 1961, the Institute became the first Deep South university to desegregate without a court order when Ralph Long, Lawrence Williams, and Ford Greene enrolled.

Robert Yancey followed the next Fall. Four years later, he became the first black graduate from Georgia Tech. Eight years after the ‘56 Sugar Bowl, Dr Calvin Huey of the Naval Academy became the first black player at Grant Field. It’d be six more years before Eddie McAshan bestowed that honor on the home team.

Coming Home

Homecoming isn’t just about returning; it’s about acknowledging change and looking ahead. The place that once measured in slide rules now leads in satellites, software, and startups.

With its incessant evolution, Georgia Tech retains its essence: demanding, proud, perpetually in motion. Getting out is hard; coming home is easy.

JD

Highlands, NC

October 11, 2025

[NB: Previous installments here and here]

The air is crisp, the temperature cool, and coffee warm. Around us are Paleozoic ridges, adorned with discolored leaves disembarking their boughs as they slowly drift to terrestrial tombs.

Atop our peaceful plateau we pause and reflect. While dew glistens and dawn breaks, we review th…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

September 15, 2025

“If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

- President George W Bush

Three disasters have defined this century. Each was precipitated, perpetuated, and exacerbated by people who used the crisis to accrue more power.

One calamity occurred as the millennium opened. The next as its first decade ended. And the third as this one started.

Our last installment discussed the initial catastrophe. Today, seventeen years after the Lehman Brothers collapse, we examine some causes and consequences of the second.

Predictable Pile-Up

The multi-decade fight against “terror” has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Congress never declared these wars, which were funded by fake money counterfeited by the Fed.

This financial finagling precipitated a predictable pile-up on this century’s road to perdition. As with any economic event afflicting billions of people, the 2008 financial crisis had many causes. But the main impetus was the Federal Reserve.

Under sound money, business cycles always occur within specific companies or industries. But they’re relatively contained.

For a given product or particular market, desire ebbs and favor flows. Supply and demand wax and wane with resource constraints, competitive pressure, customer preference, and price extremes that cure themselves.

But for the entire globe to crest and crash on the same wave means an exogenous force caused a raucous wake. Widespread booms and busts… including the Great Depression and the stagflationary Seventies… have been more extensive and severe since the founding of the Fed.

But the two decade “Great Moderation” after the early ‘80s “Volcker shock” seemed to tame the business cycle. With his Black Monday bailout in 1987, Alan Greenspan created his eponymous “put” that made him the “maestro”.

The Fed has repeatedly reprised his tune throughout this century. That makes sense. Counterfeiting is the only song they know. Like day drinking, speaking two languages, and tax avoidance, ripping people off is cool if you’re rich but can cause problems if you’re poor.

As David Stockton notes, the Fed balance sheet (the amount of money it’s conjured) increased 35-fold since the advent of the “Greenspan put”. Nominal GDP merely quintupled, with real GDP up only half that much.

After the tech bubble burst, the Fed did what it always does: created a new one. Greenspan again rode to the “rescue”.

Primary Accomplices

Like a beach ball under water, the Fed forced interest rates below the level at which they’d have naturally floated. When markets made them let go, everyone got soaked.

In a startling move at the time (tho’ in retrospect it seems like quaint restraint), Greenspan held rates at one percent for over a year. The result was the only recession on record in which house prices didn’t fall. From that “lesson”, politicians and bureaucrats encouraged borrowers to believe they never would.

During the first seven years of this century, more dollars were created than in the previous two centuries combined. In subsequent years, that ignominious record would be repeatedly eclipsed.

Much of this money flowed into mortgages, precipitating an unnatural rise in real estate prices (which was the idea). Easy credit attracted marginal speculators who had no business being in the market.

Not that the Fed didn’t have help. Among its primary accomplices were a couple privileged, state-sanctioned ambiguities known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These “Government Sponsored Entities” (GSE) purchase mortgages on the secondary market. With an implicit taxpayer backstop, they buy loans from originators, which provides those lenders additional funds to extend new loans.

This process prompts more mortgages than would otherwise exist, making it easier for people to “buy” homes they can’t afford. Government laid the bait that lulled buyers into this trap.

The tax and regulatory benefits GSEs enjoy, plus an essentially unlimited line-of-credit from the U.S. Treasury, diverted resources and distorted markets by allowing these entities to raise money and buy mortgages more easily than private competitors could.

Under political pressure to increase home “ownership” among “disadvantaged” groups, GSEs also enabled lower lending standards by easing requirements on mortgages they bought. This encouraged more reckless loans, as originators knew they could offload them from their books.

Much as student loans and lower admission standards enticed millions into college who had no business being there, the Fed, GSEs, and crony legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Equal Opportunity Credit Act attracted borrowers into mortgages they would never be able to afford.

“Generally Sound”

As Tom Woods noted in Meltdown, his definitive overview of the financial crisis, even the New York Times conceded these warped interventions “changed homeownership from something that secured a place in the middle class to something that ejected people from it.”

Loose money and low standards (a natural consequence of loose money) affected prime loans too. In many cases it infected them first, and more quickly… which undermines the notion that lenders “preyed” on subprime borrowers.

Adjustable rate mortgages enticed creditworthy speculators and “flippers” to borrow more than they otherwise would. This allowed them to bid up prices, enjoy appreciation, and sell the property before teaser rates rose… all of which attracted more speculation.

This is what the government wanted. For two decades, both political parties, including President George W Bush, urged down payment requirements be subsidized, reduced, or ditched.

As these wishes were increasingly accommodated, Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, assured us “lending standards are generally sound.” The year George Bush asked lenders to dispense with down payments, the Fed dismissed the idea there was a housing bubble.

Former Chairman Greenspan encouraged borrowers to take advantage of adjustable rate mortgages (without warning that the adjusted rates would eventually take advantage of them).

And why not? For two decades the Fed had implicitly enticed (and explicitly backstopped) reckless behavior its counterfeiting encouraged. As the housing bubble inflated, the people pumping air lamented a lack of affordable homes.

When the burst bubble finally offered the remedy, lower prices became the one tonic that wasn’t allowed. The people who caused the problem promptly pumped more of the debt and bailouts that produced the binge.

To the extent these “saviors” were criticized, it was for being too slow and stingy pouring the booze. As the hangover intensified, the bartenders decided to open the taps.

A Vietnamese Village

By March 2008, the investment bank Bear Stearns was essentially a tomb for mortgage-backed securities. Rather than bury Bear, the Fed “bought” it… and handed the casket to JP Morgan.

Within months, more institutions stumbled toward the grave.

In early September, Fannie and Freddie were nationalized. Without any Constitutional authority or consultation with Congress, the U.S. Treasury took over most of the mortgage market.

Treating the economy like a Vietnamese village, President Bush said “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system". The government continued to coat the economy with monetary napalm.

But seventeen years ago today, even the blind nut found a squirrel. The week after Fannie and Freddie were taken over, the authorities unwittingly did the right thing. Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bust. About the same time, Washington Mutual was liquidated.

In each case, good assets were acquired by others; bad ones went away. That’s the way bankruptcy is supposed to work. But the anomaly didn’t last.

The day after Lehman fell, the government bailed out AIG… and, by extension, the investment banks its credit default swaps “insured”. The Fed lent the company $85B in exchange for 80% ownership. Six weeks later, it loaned another $40B.

Anyone can make a mistake. But for a real disaster you need the government. It isn’t good at much. Yet one thing it’s great at is causing problems, then using those as reasons to stoke panic, instill urgency, compound power, and impose “solutions” that magnify the mess.

By the end of September, that skill was brought to bear. Americans were warned that without a massive bailout of Wall Street banks, small businesses would fail, the economy would collapse, and retirement plans would be wiped out.

Left unsaid was that throughout the “crisis” creditworthy borrowing kept occurring, albeit at a reduced rate and higher risk premium. That’s as it should be.

No Economy on Monday

The fake boom was the disease; the inevitable bust is the cure. As during the forgotten Depression of 1921 (which was sharp yet swift because bureaucratic “experts” did nothing), liquidations need to run their course.

In times of uncertainty after distortions caused by cheap “money”, tighter credit is what’s needed. Time is too, so malinvestments can be washed away and prices find their natural level. Patience is a virtue… something our “leaders” usually lack.

Over that September weekend when the heist was being planned, Ben Bernanke warned that “if we don’t do this [bailout] today, we won’t have an economy on Monday”. It was absurd… as if all private exchange would cease unless taxpayers were stuck with the bad loans of bankers this package would reward with bonuses.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) authorized the Treasury to spend up to $700B (a quaint tab now, but an astonishing sum at the time) to essentially buy any asset it wanted at whatever price it demanded. Those who resisted this larceny were ridiculed as ignorant ideologues who don’t appreciate the vaunted “expertise” of their bureaucratic betters.

Yet most of the “experts” were sharp as bars of soap. Among their idiotic ideas was a ban on short-selling, which had the effect of pulling a safety net from under the market. Much as not allowing businesses to bar certain races inhibits customers from identifying bigots in their midst, prohibiting short-selling removes a signal revealing which companies are less likely to be sound.

Because they must eventually buy the shares they initially borrowed, short-sellers also put an implicit floor under falling markets. Banning the practice is like replacing a trampoline with a trap door.

None of these “emergency measures” were necessary, and only exacerbated problems they purported to fix. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study showed that whereas Wall Street banks had trouble borrowing (for good reason), business, consumer, and inter-bank loans hardly declined.

The “credit crunch” was confined mostly to crony banks craving taxpayer cash to stay afloat. We were warned that letting them drown would pull us all under water. The government had no choice but to give them our boats.

Taxpayers were buffeted by waves of alphabet programs that facilitated the looting. The Term Auction Facility (TAF), Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), and Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) were among the boondoggles that ripped them off to prevent connected firms from failing.

Rotting Planks

Setting a precedent that persists today, the government sought to buy stock in these corporations. As Hugo Chavez mocked, “Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks. … He is to the left of me.”

The share purchases were orchestrated thru a new Office of Financial Stability (as Woods quipped, “what would a new government agency be without an Orwellian title?”), which would force even healthy banks to accept government money for the good of “the system”.

But there was little good about “the system”. At its core is the Federal Reserve, without which the crisis couldn’t have occurred. Yet not only was the Fed rarely fingered as a culprit, it was regularly praised as the savior.

The usual suspects were arraigned instead: “tax cuts”, “deregulation”, and insufficient power of government officials to push the rest of us around. To “rectify” this, new agencies and edicts were propagated, by people who neither saw the crisis coming nor had a clue what caused it… while dismissing those who did as cranks and quacks.

Rather than allow the economy to purge the distortions and excesses that made it sick, they hopped behind the bar and began mixing more drinks. Anything to avoid last call.

The Fed was hellbent on keeping the sun from coming up. Making his predecessor look stingier than Shylock, Ben Bernanke dropped the fed funds rate to zero… where it sat almost a decade.

He implemented quantitative easing by buying government bonds and mortgage backed securities with currency conjured from thin air. Even foreign institutions were bailed out with money inflated away from American wallets.

Superficially, these measures seemed to “work”. For their intended beneficiaries, they did.

With historic infusions of cash, panic subsided, markets reversed, and bonuses were paid. But beneath the shiny veneer remained rotting planks. On their underside, weevils and beetles continued to bore.

They’d do so for a decade, till the next cataclysm blew out the boards.

JD

Atlanta, GA

September 11, 2025

“We are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”

- Osama bin Laden

In some ways it seems this century just started. In others it feels like the last one ended a lifetime ago. To more than 40% of the global population, it did.

About 3.4B people are under age 25. They never knew a world without the Internet or cell phones, “binge watching” or social media; where “text” wasn’t a verb, a garden hose supplied our sports drink, an electronic device wasn’t a permanent appendage, World Series games were played during the day, and arriving passengers could be met at the gate.

When asked in 1972 to assess the impact of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai said it was “too soon to tell.” That attribution is probably apocryphal, but it makes a point.

The new millennium is still marinating. We’ll be gone long before it’s done. But while it simmers let’s step back from the stove, and review the stew from a disinterested distance.

One-Way Dead-End Street

It can be argued that when the century turned, America was at its apogee. The US was the world’s undisputed power. Public and private finances were deteriorating, but debt remained manageable.

Politicians were corrupt, but mostly coherent. The government butted into places it didn’t belong, yet at least pretended not to be at war with the world…or against us.

Americans generally got along, race was becoming an afterthought, things were relatively affordable, people found humor instead of taking offense, and politics hadn’t poisoned everything. We could laugh at each other… and at ourselves.

A quarter the way thru, the Twenty-First century is riding down a one-way dead-end street. As it weaves and careens, we pull it over, shine a light thru the window, and wonder what it has to say for itself.

It best be careful. Anything it utters can and will be used against it. There’s not much that won’t come across as more of a confession than a boast.

Like its predecessor, if this century were smart it’d take the Fifth. But it better do so quick, before that prerogative is ripped away. All the same, let’s put the last two and a half decades in the dock.

The Day Everything Changed

There was some debate about when the millennium started. Was it the first day of 2000, or of 2001? I’d argue it was neither.

Like most siblings, decades and eras have common characteristics but different birthdays. What we think of as “the 1930s” began on October 29, 1929, the ‘40s on December 7, 1941, the ‘60s on November 22, 1963, and the 1990s when the Wall came down.

As last century was launched when the Maine sank in Havana harbor, this one turned when the Twin Towers were toppled.

That was the day everything changed. The remnants of the U.S. Constitution went in the shredder, and the world we’d known was gone for good. That’s obvious in retrospect, but it was also clear at the time.

To anyone paying attention, the attacks were shocking, but not surprising. After decades of U.S. government mayhem in Muslim lands, a violent response was bound to occur.

Rather than be introspective and wonder what mischief could’ve provoked such malice, our “leaders” did what they always do: committed more of it. They doubled-down by stoking fear, intervening everywhere, and making everything worse.

Instead of blaming their own covert coups and military misadventures, government officials told us “the terrorists hated us for our freedom”. So to keep us safe, they stripped more of them away.

They invaded countries they’d already wanted to conquer, cracked down on the one they already ruled, and counterfeited trillions of new currency so we could pay for their “mistakes”.

This is precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted them to do. The 9/11 attacks were meant to provoke an overreaction, akin to how the bin Laden-funded Mujahideen (which a couple US administrations supported) made Afghanistan the Soviets’ “Vietnam”.

To quote veteran intelligence reporter James Bamford from Scott Horton’s indispensable book, Enough Already:

“[bin Laden’s partner] Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al Qaeda should bring the war to the ‘distant enemy’ [to] provoke the Americans to strike back and ‘personally wage the battle against Muslims’. It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear, … they believed the U.S. and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam.”

To borrow a phrase President Bush inadvertently made infamous: “Mission Accomplished!”

If anything, bin Laden got more than he could’ve wished. Since the Terror Wars started, Islamic radicals have proliferated, American puppet regimes have destabilized, Israel is ostracized, and U.S. debt has more doubled each decade.

The pre-packaged “Patriot” Act came off the shelf. This abomination gave the U.S. government the (unconstitutional) tools it needed to wage perpetual war. It would be fought on two fronts.

The Department of “Defense” would battle nebulous menaces abroad, and a creepy new Department of “Homeland Security” would tackle “terror” at home. The main target was the usual suspects:

Us.

Naturally, we’d be entitled to less liberty. Imbecilic “terror alerts”, color codes, asbestos scares, underwear bombs, deadly shoes, water bottle bans, and toothpaste confiscation frightened anxious Americans into forgoing their freedom.

Airports became giant screening depots, where identification became mandatory and passengers were groped or nuked to board a plane. Frisking, scanning, clear bags, and assorted acts of security kabuki also infested concerts, ballgames, and other popular events.

For Our Protection

As always when an “emergency” recedes, the State retained the illegal powers it grabbed based on fear it fomented. Despite early pockets of resistance (and welcome whistleblowers such as Ed Snowden), “terror” screening has evolved into ubiquitous surveillance Americans blithely accept.

The clamp-down was quick, and compliance coerced from the get-go... at home and abroad. Whoever resisted was suspected of supporting (or belonging on) a lengthening list of elusive “enemies.” As President Bush put it with typical nuance, “you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists. There’s no in between.”

He had no advice for anyone who couldn’t tell the difference.

This dopey dichotomy is a familiar tactic when degenerate empires try to consolidate control. Neutrality is an option they can’t abide. “Antagonist” or “ally” is fine. Bankers, weapons manufacturers, and other connected industries make money from both.

But neutrals don’t fuel the gravy train. That’s why they must pick a side. Either buy US weapons… or be bombed by them. The Empire can’t abide its global satraps trying to mind their own business.

Wanting to be left alone is frowned upon in the “homeland” too. For our protection (why else?), officials urged us to snitch on each other. If we saw something, we were supposed to say something. After all, can’t be too safe!

Throughout the century, this would be a recurring theme. Our rulers urged us to fear everything (especially each other), while doing what “authorities” said so they could protect us.

Naturally, freedom and privacy were intolerable threats. Like a driver ditching his weed when the cops give chase, the Fourth Amendment went out the window.

Americans’ bank accounts were scrutinized, transactions limited, identification digitized, communication monitored, travel tracked, and property confiscated.

To defeat “the terrorists”, the US government assumed all Americans were criminals. They may not be safe; but they’d certainly be secure.

More Cigarettes

Having escaped what remained of its leash and corralled its ostensible “owners”, the war machine was free to run wild.

After Americans were attacked by a pack of Shi’ite Saudi militants, the U.S. government did what we’d expect them to do: invaded countries other than the place the attackers were from… including one ruled by an enemy of the jihadists who struck the States.

For twenty years, that pattern has repeated. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Somalia, the U.S. government invaded, bombed, or overthrew regimes that posed no threat to any American state. In many cases, it funded every side of conflicts it helped create, fought groups it previously formed or supported, and often backed its avowed enemies… including al Qaeda and ISIS.

Since most Americans are unaware these wars are raging (and few complain when they find out), the ice cream cone keeps licking itself. Martial lawlessness has become second nature.

“Kill lists”, drone strikes, aerial attacks, proxy wars, missile launches, and the bombing of tiny boats off Venezuela are undertaken with the indifference of choosing the color of a Model-T.

The incumbent administration hardly matters. All of them kowtow to the military complex, bend a knee to the Israeli lobby, and fund several sides in these endless wars.

“Terror” is an ideal enemy… a tactic and emotion that can never be defeated, yet a great excuse to topple recalcitrant regimes. No one really knows what the word means (which is intentional), so the government instinctively applies the label to anyone it doesn’t like.

The “Terror Wars” were (and are) among the most catastrophic atrocities the U.S. government ever committed. The ramifications will roil the world for years to come. They cost trillions of dollars, created millions of corpses, unleashed hordes of refugees, and (most lucratively) fresh enemies for the regime to fight.

Those of us who’d warned that relentless bombing, invasions, meddling, and coups might provoke retaliation were ridiculed (or worse) for not advocating adequate “response” to this predictable attack.

It was like being criticized for not having a cure for cancer after spending years urging the patient not to smoke. To fight the tumor, tobacco companies’ only answer was to prescribe more cigarettes.

Predictable Phenomenon

As usually happens when governments make a mess, the people who cause the calamity are entrusted to craft a solution.

Rather than keep silent, cover their faces, and find a monastery to do penance, the culprits blame everyone else… then use their failure to justify more power for themselves.

And it works! Almost without fail, government gets more resources after catastrophes it creates, then makes new ones and lies about how they were caused.

The “War on Terror” was a glaring example of this predictable phenomenon. As we’ll see in upcoming installments, it wouldn’t be the last.

JD

Atlanta, GA

July 4, 2025

On the Fourth of July, as on any momentous occasion, myths mingle with reality. Even the date we’re supposed to remember was initially in question.

Congress voted for independence two days before it was formally declared. John Adams always thought July 2 the more appropriate day to celebrate, and…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

May 11, 2025

If we say anything is Woodrow Wilson’s fault, we are almost certain to be right. It’s a useful heuristic, if not a guaranteed one.

In 1914, Wilson signed a proclamation setting aside the second Sunday in May for Americans to remember their mothers. The idea came from Anna Jarvis, a Methodist “social activist” of a type all-too comm…

Read more

Dachau, Germany

May 9, 2007

Our meetings ended yesterday, but our hosts provided an extra night in the hotel so we could enjoy a full day in Munich.

But there was another place I thought I should go. I initially didn’t know if I could bring myself to do it. Yet I realized I must.

A couple days sampling fine arts, high altars, elegant architec…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

April 29, 2025

In December I was interviewed for a potential documentary about my late aunt (prompted by a lengthy Wall Street Journal profile, linked here).

The discussion was about my relationship with her, her career as first producer of the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, her accomplishments creating acclaimed documentaries…and how she ended up homeless in Palm Beach Gardens.

Jo Franklin produced several notable films, mostly about the Middle East. During my conversation about her life, those accomplishments obviously came up.

One of them was top of mind a couple nights ago, when the BBC aired The Settlers, Louis Theroux’s follow-up to his 2011 documentary, The Ultra Zionists. Each covered terrain my Aunt Jo Anne once trod.

Days of Rage

In 1989, she released a film that drew one of the largest audiences ever to watch a PBS program. It also attracted the greatest controversy that network ever garnered.

Televised on approximately 300 stations across the US, Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians provoked protests, accusations of funding irregularities, and criticisms of PBS for presenting unapproved perspectives.

The documentary almost wasn’t shown. Its initial broadcast was cancelled, because it offended people who shared sentiments expressed by a couple interviewees during the opening sequence:

“I appreciate that [the Palestinians] would like their own state,” said one of them. “But I’m not sure the world needs another…a 24th Arab Muslim, possibly radical…state in an area so sensitive as this.”

A few seconds later, Daniella Weiss (the “godmother of settlers”) chimed in with this gem:

“The solution is finding a national expression for Palestinians somewhere in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia, in the Sahara, in north Syria. Not where it touches or endangers the future of the state of Israel.”

How kind of this woman (who last month was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her ongoing advocacy of ethnic cleansing) to offer desolate wastelands to people whose parents were forcibly evicted from their property to accommodate a century of settlers from eastern Europe.

Contrary to our contemporary assumptions, antipathy between Jew and Arab isn’t an ancient hatred. For a millennium till the late 19th century, Levantine Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony. During that period, relations were much more amicable than what Jews endured in most of Europe.

So what caused this contested region to become “so sensitive?”

From the Temple to the Intifada

Modern Israel isn’t the Old Testament land of the Jews. That was shattered two millennia ago by people other than those the Israeli government keeps displacing.

About four decades after the crucifixion of Christ, the Romans destroyed the Temple and dispersed the Jews. By the time Mohammad was born, most Hebrews had long since left the region. But for more than a thousand years, those who remained were treated relatively well.

Private property is paramount. Its violation is what causes conflict; its restoration usually resolves it.

Despite rotating rulers, private property was respected for centuries among Arabs and Jews. It was generally honored in law and peaceably transferred thru voluntary exchange.

There was implicit recognition that these rights are individual, not collective. Ownership in Palestine was determined by agreement between buyers and sellers, not ethnic allocation based on sweeping assertions in holy books.

Acrimony arose when East European Zionists encroached on private property of native Palestinians. Their understandable migration was prompted by European pogroms in the nineteenth century. But it accelerated after the Balfour Declaration issued in exchange for Rothschild funds that helped Britain finance the First World War.

In the wake of that calamity, pogroms continued… killing 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone. The next three decades, for such sympathetic reasons, Jews continued fleeing to Palestine.

That they’d seek distant refuge certainly made sense. But horrors in one place don’t excuse injustice in another. Confiscation of Palestinian property didn’t begin in 1967, or even 1948.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most of Palestine was Muslim. About ten percent was Jewish, with a comparable Christian cohort. The incoming (mostly secular) Zionists, like any new arrivals, were more than welcome to purchase Palestinian land from any inhabitants. Some did.

But many didn’t.

Between the wars, Arab tenant farmers were dispossessed by this rising tide of European migrants. Predictably, riots and uprisings proliferated in Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian revolts and Zionist terrorism, punctuated by the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, amplified tensions.

The Holocaust provided an irresistible impetus for a Jewish exodus to a new “homeland”. In 1947, they essentially got it.

Palestine was partitioned into an Arab state, a Jewish one, and the city of Jerusalem which (with Bethlehem) would be under the provision of the nascent United Nations.

The U.N. was founded just a few years earlier, and had no authority to carve countries into existence (tho’ there’s ample evidence it never did).

In May of the following year, David Ben-Gurion unilaterally proclaimed the new state for his transplanted people. Native Arabs naturally resisted, and war erupted. Three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees were pushed from their property in the land now known as Israel.

Most moved (or, rather, were removed) to squalid camps in the Gaza Strip and along the West Bank of the Jordan River. In 1967, after two decades of riots and uprisings, Israel launched a “preemptive” strike against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Within Six Days, it captured the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip.

Israel returned Sinai during the Camp David Accords, since which the U.S. has bribed Egypt to leave Israel alone. Israel has kept (and expanded) it’s other holdings ever since, including the simmering resentment of an occupied people.

Which brings us back to my aunt’s film.

The Balance

Her documentary depicted the First Intifada from the Palestinian perspective. In Gaza and the West Bank, Jo Anne interviewed young resisters, letting them describe their experiences, frustrations, aspirations, and treatment. She offered minimal narration, allowing the Palestinians to paint a picture of their ongoing uprising.

Three months after its initial cancellation, Days of Rage was given clearance to take the air. But it included “wrap-around” panel discussions before and after that cloaked the message of the movie in perspectives of those who wanted it smothered.

Would a pro-Israeli film have required similar mitigation? The question answers itself. The story (and irony) of Israelis displacing “undesirables” and putting them in camps was supposed to go unremarked.

It’s not that Days of Rage wasn’t “unbalanced”. Of course it was. That was the point!

It was the balance. Then as now, the Israeli perspective permeated the press… and was veritably compulsory on almost every American politician. Even the slightest push-back isn’t permitted… as my aunt discovered.

Not that she didn’t know what she was getting into. And if she didn’t, she should have. She’d been in the business twenty years. She knew the Israeli lobby wielded enormous power. But she may have underestimated it.

Grabbing Oars

In the 1970s and 80s, Jo Anne was a pioneer. Particularly in the Middle East. It took guts for a pretty blue-eyed blonde to poke around the Muslim world.

But even more to infuriate Israeli interests in Washington and on Wall Street. Bankers, munitions makers, and the power elite steering the ship of state don’t appreciate uppity filmmakers grabbing oars that rock their boat.

This documentary was essentially the culmination of Jo Anne’s career. She was never the same after it aired. Her descent into self-destruction and delusion accelerated, along a trail of fraud and debt that led inexorably to life as a bag lady in a hotel garage.

My aunt made a film that dared provide an opposing perspective. Doing so likely cost her career. It almost certainly precipitated its decline.

Like the rest of her family, I was estranged from Jo Anne the last years of her life. Sadly, thru her own actions, she allowed what mattered most to slip away.

But despite efforts of its detractors to kill it in the crib, Days of Rage survived suppression, and stuck around.

Unfortunately, it looks like they will for a while.

JD

Atlanta, GA

March 4, 2025

“The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable.”

– Madame de Staël

“500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend [Ukraine] against 140 million Russians.”

- Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland

For three years, many who couldn’t previously distinguish the Ukraine from a ukulele confidently ident…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

February 28, 2025

He opted for an ivory grip on his new revolver, thinking it would look better in the museum after he’d done the deed.

It did, but not for long. The weapon was given to the Smithsonian, where it was eventually “lost”.

But the mind of Charles Guiteau was already gone, and it was convinced James Garfield had to go. Gui…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

February 25, 2025

“Richelieu founded Odessa – watched over it with paternal care – labored with a fertile brain and a wise understanding for its best interests – spent his fortune freely to the same end – endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet make it one of the great cities of the Old Wo…

Read more

Sedona, AZ

December 25, 2024

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

– Christina Rossetti and Gustav Holst: In the Bleak Mid-Winter

The search for universal essence began…like so many things…in ancient Greece, on the shores of Ionia.

Th…

Read more

November 26, 2020

We are blessed.

Our house is in a reclusive spot, away from the noise. Not that we’re entirely immune. Periodically…like fumes from a waste dump… “news” seeps thru the sieve of our screens.

But from our back window, calm prevails. We are in …

Read more

July 14, 2024

The most consequential events of modern history began 235 years ago, on the streets of Paris and the road to Versailles. The stone cast in 1789 splashed in the Seine, soaked all of Europe, and …

Read more

May 12, 2024

If we say anything is Woodrow Wilson’s fault, we are almost certain to be right. It’s a useful heuristic, if not a guaranteed one. 

In 1914, Wilson signed a proclamation setting aside the second …

Read more

April 27, 2024

Yesterday, we recalled how Panamanians assumed control of their canal. Today, after a visit to the Miraflores Locks, we look more closely at what they acquired.

Transoceanic trade includes four key conduits: the Straits of Malacca and Gibraltar, the canal at Suez…

…and the tropical trench we visited yesterday.

Before this week, we’d been thru Panama, but never to it. We sailed its canal seven years ago. It’s a marvel of ingenuity and the apex of engineering, justifiably ranked among the wonders of the world.

Locks at either end lift ships to Gatun Lake, an artificial reservoir created to reduce excavation required to construct the canal. When completed, it was the largest dam and man-made lake in the world. But it didn’t come easy.

Seeking a Way Across the Isthmus

Emperor Charles V was first to float the idea of a Central American water route. In 1534, he ordered a survey of potential shortcuts for Spanish ships sailing to Peru.

A century later, the Scottish attempted an overland path thru the Darién Gap. It failed miserably, leaving Scotland financially ruined, and prompting its acquiescence to the Act of Union.

The notion of a waterway revived in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Erie canal was completed in New York. The British gave it a shot, but their effort never got off the ground.

The California Gold Rush accelerated interest, prompting US construction of the Panama Railroad across the isthmus. Finished in 1855, its tracks cleared jungle that eased creation of the eventual canal. A quarter century later, the French determined to get it built.

A dozen years after his success at Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps turned his attention to the Isthmus of Panama. The two places couldn’t be more different. Lesseps’s stubborn insistence on a sea-level canal confirmed the contrast.

His earlier channel…across flat, vast, desert terrain…attracted funding for the new one. But it couldn’t overcome torrential rains, dense flora, venomous fauna, treacherous topography, and tropical disease in a rugged jungle.

Within a decade, the money dissipated and many men were dead. The effort was abandoned, and those who led it were prosecuted or shamed.

A few years later, the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama took over the project, recommending locks and lakes to convey ships thru the cut.

But its main job was to run the railroad and maintain the existing excavation and equipment so they could be sold. Phillipe Bunau-Varilla was made manager of the company, and offered all its assets for $100M.

He found a buyer in the United States. But not at his price. Competing proposals resurfaced for a canal further north, thru Lake Nicaragua.

With this bargaining chip, the Americans offered Bunau-Varilla $40M for the Panama property.

To cut his losses, he begrudgingly accepted.

Gunboat Diplomacy for Banker Benefactors

During these negotiations, Colombia demanded the U.S. pay it $10M to build the canal. Having already forked over $40M to purchase that right, Roosevelt resorted to “gunboat diplomacy”…fomenting a phony “revolution” to sever Panama from Colombia.

The president had self-interested reasons for denying Colombia a cut. The $10M would’ve come out of the $40M given to the real owners of the “French” company…a Wall Street syndicate headed by Roosevelt’s benefactor, J.P. Morgan.

With the Nicaragua threat, and because the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama was basically bankrupt, the banker consortium (of which  Roosevelt’s brother-in-law was also a member) secretly bought the company on the cheap. The Panamanian “rebellion” was a ruse instigated to preserve their profit.

After the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, the U.S. took control. A Canal Zone was established across the isthmus, including the “Culebra Cut” that cleaves the eponymous range at the Continental Divide.

Marriage by Divorce

The nine-mile cut is among engineering’s monumental accomplishments. The French started it, but yellow fever and financial difficulties left it incomplete. When the Americans took over, they widened the cut, with locks alleviating need for a deeper dig. At some point, it was more feasible to lift the water than lower the land.

As Ira Bennett put it in his History of the Panama Canal, engineers could marry the oceans only by divorcing the mountains.

It took six thousand men to put them asunder. Hundreds of compressed air drills bored holes for half a million pounds of dynamite per month. Explosions fractured rock so steam shovels could pull it away.

To accommodate literally mountains of material, engineers converted a nearby Pacific island into a new peninsula. This new land bridge doubles as a breakwater keeping silt from Panama Bay from entering the Panama Canal.

Almost two hundred daily trains hauled excavations from the cut, requiring careful coordination and skilled logistics to manage trains entering and exiting almost every minute.

A Reluctant Confession

At this point…despite my pedigree…I’m compelled to whisper a reluctant confession: the canal owes (almost) as much to Industrial as to Civil Engineering. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a Georgia Tech civil engineer invited to be here by a group of Georgia Tech industrial engineers…one of whom happens to be my wife.

I admit it because it’s true. Till the Americans took over construction of the canal, there was little semblance of operational rigor or logistics management...or even of preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. There seems to have been little preparation at all.

Inadequate planning, organization, systems, and processes were among the primary reasons the French failed. Lesseps assumed Panama would resemble Suez. Discarding these misconceptions and deficiencies would be indispensable to completing the canal.

Civil engineers design and manage the geotechnical, seismic, material, structural, and hydraulic components of canal construction. Industrial engineers coordinate the logistics, systems, and supply chains that make the project possible.

Yet even the best-laid plans couldn’t prevent unforeseen obstacles. Among the most challenging were landslides.

Tropical Glaciers and a Raging River

The first and largest was described as a “tropical glacier”, of mud rather than ice, composed of clay too soft for steam shovels to remove. Till the sludge was eventually sluiced away, these avalanches of ooze led many to believe a canal couldn’t be built.

But as work resumed, doubt remained. To minimize risk, rock heights were reduced and additional sediment was removed from upper levels.

But landslides persisted throughout construction. Some continued after the canal was completed, resulting in intermittent closures.

Rarely has Nature marshalled so many forces to defend her territory. But after each retreat, engineers regrouped, and resumed their advance.

Unanticipated impediments should be expected. And perhaps we should feel fortunate some predictions aren’t perfect.

Before work began, had anyone known what the task would entail…that the Culebra Cut would cost $10M per mile and excavate 100M cubic yards of material, that lock-level cuts removed as much material as was estimated for sea-level cuts, that more material was taken from the Culebra Cut than was initially predicted for the entire channel from ocean to ocean…there might not be a Panama Canal today.

If the Culebra represented one challenge, the Chagres offered another.

This is among the rare rivers that (now) empties into two oceans. Its natural course is toward the Atlantic. But canal construction also pulled its waters thru the locks and cut, and into to the Pacific.

The Chagres was a wild stream, unruly and tumultuous. Taming it was essential to creating the canal, and preserving the primary water supply of the Panamanian people.

When the Americans took over, engineer John Stevens decided to control the river by capturing it.

Rather than cut a new canal along the entire length of the existing torrent, Stevens dammed the Chagres to create a lake. Lake Gatun would ease construction between the Atlantic locks and the Culebra cut.

Two decades later, second dam created a reservoir to replenish the canal. Over the last year, it hasn’t been enough. A La Niña-induced drought dropped water-levels to historic lows.

Because of decreased draft, daily transits are drastically reduced. This summer, they’ll slowly be added back. But the Canal Authority is being careful.

A New Challenge

Among the world’s transoceanic trade channels, the Panama Canal is the only one that’s (mostly) fresh water. That water supplies the needs of Panamanian citizens, which take priority over commercial passages.

And as water level has sunk and larger locks have been added, increased salinity…particularly from the Pacific…has infiltrated the interior. Salt water fish are appearing in greater abundance. Even small sharks have been seen in the canal watershed.

Should salt intrusion become too great, water from Gatun Lake could become unsuitable for drinking. Keeping it consumable is the new challenge for canal engineers.

Having had the pleasure of meeting a few of them yesterday, and of speaking with some of our hosts from the Logistics Innovation and Research Center of Georgia Tech Panamá, we think they’re up to the task.

JD