The Meleagris gallopavois, favored by none other than Ben Franklin to be America’s national symbol, is known to be a real ‘bird-brain’...

Today, a Saturday, began somewhat spectacularly (for a change) here.

I had arisen at my usual time (4AM, more or less a few), grabbed my java , sat myself down and managed to finish off the most recent issue of THE SPECTATOR magazine, as well as a chapter in a fascinating 1993 book about the German ‘Black Flag’ surrender of the surviving Kriegsmarine U-boats on 4 May 1945. Fortunately, my cerebral cortex and eyes decided to cooperate optimally, too (not always a sure thing, these days)!

Much air-time and copious neo-Marxist vitriol has been expulsed in the left’s passionately obsessive habit of calling anything it disagrees with, ‘NAZI’; but as a historian (and a closet submerged-warfare fan...e.g. submarines...for most of my life), the subject of the German submarine campaigns of the First and Second World Wars has always been a subject of considerable interest.

And why exactly is that, you might well ask? Because the whole concept of allowing one’s self to be voluntarily sealed into an airtight (but quite vulnerable) metal tube and told to fight the enemy underwater is so far beyond my ability to wrap my mind around it that anyone who has served in the submarine service, regardless of the nationality, has my deepest respect and regard for possessing extreme courage and exemplary bravery (if only for the subjective hazards of such undertakings).

When it comes to submersibles (diesel-electric powered submerged war vessels) or to true submarines (their nuclear-powered counterparts), the German developments in submerged warfare have to stand out as among the most noteworthy weapons undertakings throughout all of recorded history.

There are several very good and authoritative reference books out on this specific phase of the German WW2 submarine campaign, all of which I have added to my rather extensive library, and I’ve just begun reading the most recent and latest addition, dated 2025 and available through the US Naval Institute.

Having thus begun on my Saturday in this manner, after finishing the ritual protein drink (full, I am informed, of hazardous ‘heavy metal contamination’, or so says THE EPOCH TIMES) and modest bowl of fibrous ‘Cheery Crunchies’ (not their real name), I hitched up NALA, Her Supremely Serene Grace, the Grand Duchess of Eastern Siberia (my Siberian Husky grrrrl) after bundling up in layers of toasty wool, and headed out for our first walkies of the day.

Today dawned crystal clear and chill, following several days of much-needed ‘soaking rain’, and both of us began our mile-and-a-half, 4-mph trek through the adjacent neighborhood.

About two blocks into this quotidian pursuit and still about half-way to the local park that the grrrrl so much loves to sniff and squirt in, we encountered a chap and his medium-sized white dog whom we pass almost every day, enroute. After two years of nodding and the usual “good mornings”, we’ve always gone along on our way without further ado. But today, we rather spontaneously stopped and chatted for a few moments as our pups eyed each-other (doubtless wondering what each other’s butts smelt like).

The chap’s name is Bob and his male doggie’s name is, amusingly, “Romeo.”

Over the course of the next 15-minutes it emerged that both of us have been motorcylistas in past decades...a fact that came out when I noted the Harley-Davidson logo on his woolen cap and asked him if he had one of those beastly wheeled noise-makers.

Interestingly, he told me that he had had motorcycles since high school days (just like me), but about a year ago he came chillingly close to having a major (and likely fatal for him) accident when some young jerk in a hopped-up Chevy Camaro who came within mere millimeters of side-swiping him at speed, during a grossly misjudged passing maneuver.

With that “Come to Jesus” moment, he says he realized that 70s-year-olds are poking the envelope of fate altogether rather rashly, riding on a big, powerful motorcycle, given both the decline in one’s mind/hand coordination with age AND the prevalence of youthfully immature jerks (of both genders) in powerful cars they should never have been licensed to drive. With that red warning flag of fate still flapping wildly in his mind, he sold the Harley as a result and decided to stick with sports cars (again, remarkably similar to my decision).

That congruence of decisions spurred my interest, have also decided about a year ago that it was time to hang up my own helmet, stopping driving powerful Japanese super-bikes, and also reverting back to my life-long love of Porsche cars and VWs.

My reflexes may be too diminished to wish to remain a juicy target for some young puke in a 500hp wheeled murder machine, but I can still handle a sports car with the best of them. And it’s a lot more comforting having a steel cage around me on the highway than empty air to protect against suddenly seeing God!

Turns out he got himself a nifty, sexy BMW Z8 roadster. Whereupon I mentioned my own reversion to sports cars (I’ve never yet reached ‘Sports car menopause’) and my Porsches and VWs, past & present. Bingo, several apparently common interests. It doesn’t happen like that these days very often, in our age of COVID-19 “6-feet-of-distance” awkward separation, and too many of us continue to unconsciously avoid others for that specious reason.

As I mentioned earlier, his dog is named “Romeo”, which is quite the coincidence for several reasons. First, “Romeo” was the name of that famously human-friendly Alaskan Black Wolf up in Juneau back in the mid-80s of the same name, that wildlife photographer/writer Nick Jans wrote so eloquently about in his book ‘A Wolf Called Romeo.’ That (true) story tells of a wonderfully gentle and human-friendly, but fatally trusting wild Black Wolf who inexplicably liked humans and their dogs so much that a pathologically sick person was able to approach him and gratuitously kill him.

“Romeo” is also the (Christian) name of an individual named Romeo Polombo, a civil engineer who was given a new 1971 Volkswagen Bug by his father (as back payment for work done in the family grocery store), and this morning I ran across his story of the car and their lasting relationship (he still has the car!) on the Hagerty (Auto) News. Another coincidence, to be sure, but both rather curious and backstories that set the stage for having a somewhat brighter-than-usual, less pessimistic mood this AM.

Bob and I parted with a congenial suggestion that perhaps we should get together over coffee in future, since we seem to have quite a bit in common (seemingly rare enough, these chaotic days in the ‘Woke Age’). It was a great idea, given that so many people today (notably men, whose innate behavioral nature has been rather stupidly dismissed by so many caustic feminist Harpies as ‘toxic masculinity’) and I would venture to submit that a huge number of us are consequently more than a bit isolated, lonely, with few real friends and hardly anyone we can count on to understand or care for us misunderstood males as fully vested humans.

Believe me, it doesn’t happen like this very often these days, since men are traditionally taught in our culture to be self-contained and not given to innate fraternal, friendly good will in our present, sorely conflicted and female-dominated (read: oppressed, even) society. If you believe the radical feminists, that is.

All in all, a great way to begin an Autumn day, as HRH and I headed the remaining short distance to the park. As we progressed (and HRH squirted), I became further mindful of recent studies I’ve come across in the medical (psychology) literature about the dire nature and impact of our increasing collective social anomie, and the physiological toll that heightened feelings of societal loneliness exact from us humming beans.

Naturally, the one-two, gut-punch of the COVID pandemic, in combination with the brainless leftist progressive shift towards Marxist-socialism (hello, George Floyd, Herbert Marcuse, “wokeism”, critical theory, LGBTQ+ radicalisms, and “Diversity is a blessing” ideological hype, etc.), has resulted (among many things) in the emergence of successive new waves of imbalanced feminist hysteria in America. Ironically (this city, “Suckatomato”, being both the capital of leftist progressive Californicatia, as well as a literal beehive of LGBTQ+ radical activism), the stale and grossly misunderstood mantra of “Diversity is our blessing!” has yet to lose its luster among the half-baked amongst us, dramatically heightening and furthering the social fragmentation that is currently tearing traditional democratic America limb-from-limb.

Diversity, like so many other concepts in the United States that are firmly but grossly miscomprehended by our younger generations, is not in fact a blessing but a dangerously irresponsible liability unless it is properly, wisely and competently modulated, for true diversity in every complex nuance of the word is terribly complicated. It is not at all merely a simple act of welcoming at the border to any warm body that chooses to violate US territorial borders illegally and unconditionally.

Diversity, properly grasped, imposes a huge and immensely demanding burden of both personal and collective responsibility upon all who gather together under that simplistic catch-word and the younger leftist radicals who so thoughtlessly proclaim and naïvely affirm their belief in it (not in the complex and deeper underlying conditional aspects of it that qualify and define the word itself), abysmally fail to grasp the least bit of requisite reasoning and logic upon which tr ue ‘diversity’ is founded.

John Adams, one of the more brilliant framers of our constitution, memorably observed: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

Adams’ writings emphasize the necessity of general morality and virtue, which he associated with the general principles of Christianity, to enable the republic to function successfully. Principles and qualities which elude most younger people in America (and a hell of a lot of older ones, who should know better by now).

And of course, given that both Marxism and Islam are categorically opposed at their cores to the Christian religion and/or all tenets of ‘Christian morality and virtue’, these finer points of our national heritage are completely lost on most Gen-Z’ers, who want immediate, easy solutions to horrendously complex and far-reaching issues that demand intimate insights into America’s founding principles and ethics, and eschew anything that demands balanced, rational and perhaps even exhaustively protracted colloquy.

 I share the belief that without that strong sense of personal and collective responsibility that John Adams’ America is founded upon, no nation (least of all the United States) that presumes to be a truly democratic state may long endure or survive.