THE TAOS TATLER.

News item: “At Wednesday night’s (Feb. 23) regular school board meeting, [Municipal Schools Superintendent Lillian] Torrez said the district’s mask policy will remain unchanged at least until the board’s next meeting, and most likely until after spring break.”

Taos News, 3 March 2022.

“In the first place, God created idiots. That was for practice. Then he created school boards.”

–Mark Twain: Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, 1894.

How much longer must this wreckage stand?

Taos is blessed with marvelous assets, its stunning scenery, extraordinary history, artiness, quirkiness, even grittiness, the latter distinguishing it most favorably from oh-so-precious, oh-so-exclusive resort towns like Jackson, WY, Lake Tahoe, CA, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, MA, Ogunquit, ME, to name just a few.

Grittiness however ends at ugliness. For four years now the abandoned wreck seen above, just steps from Taos Plaza, the town nucleus, has been a visual pollutant, and as it also stands at the main entry into town, presents a dispiriting welcome to our many visitors, so vital to the local economy.

Your Tatler has no idea the explanation this monstrosity is still allowed to litter our landscape, but chances are good words like “bankruptcy,” “lawsuit(s),” “continuance(s),” “stay(s), “environmental hazards” and the like are to be found in it; also a possibility, a sclerotic bureaucracy not willing to take responsibility and tackle this problem head on.

Whatever: after so many years, explanations simply become excuses. Since it does not appear any human action removing this horror will occur in your Tatler’s remaining years, even though statistically there are a fair number of them, would it be remiss to pray for divine intervention, perhaps a bolt or two of lightening striking this eyesore, and would it be fanciful to believe there would be few wet eyes in Taos were this blessed event to occur? Oremus ad omnipotentis Dei.

Time to find another profession.

From the Post:

“We are a nation of lions and we are being led by a sheep.”

—Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas).

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

It’s hardly over, but measured by her heart and spirit, Ukraine has already defeated the Russian host. No matter how much damage and killing inflicted upon that beleaguered but proud people, they have shown both resistance and resilience and world opinion, finally, is overwhelmingly on their side (soon President Putin’s only friend will be President Xi of China and you can bet the latter autocrat is seriously taking stock of that friendship).

Ukraine’s history is far older than Russia’s, being settled by Slavs as far back as the 5th century. It was Christianized with the baptism of Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev in 988, in fact, metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church were all successors of his until 1488. Despite Ukraine’s tortured history over the centuries, Ukrainians have held firmly to their religion and culture despite numerous attempts by the Russians-Soviets to snuff them out. Even today, 72% of Ukrainians are observant Christians, the great majority of them Eastern Orthodox, with a smattering of others, including Catholicism.

There is an inspiring story in Fox News today about a young Ukrainian couple engaged to be wed. They set a date but agreed if the Russians invaded before that they would marry immediately. That they did, soon after the invasion began. As soon as the wedding was over however, instead of going on a wedding trip, both bride and groom immediately signed on with the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces and are spending their honeymoon fighting the Russians.

If this pious and brave young couple is representative of most Ukrainians, and by all appearances they are, Putin and his army are in for a long struggle with that country, not likely to see victory and never to see surrender.

Would they know “not the sharpest knife in the drawer?“

A blogging colleague recently lamented familiar expressions or idioms are disappearing from our English language, thanks to dumb-downed schooling in this country. Some examples might include: “the shoe is on the other foot,” “strike while iron is hot,” “champing at the bit”and “another feather in your cap.” Older literature, where these idioms might be found, is no longer read in our schools, having been crowded out by “woker” texts or even banned.

A sad example of the idiomatically challenged, this involving the latter example in my list above, aired recently on that puerile TV game show, “Wheel of Fortune” (ironic America’s dumbest game show is hosted by America’s brightest game show host). Watch below as the unfortunate contestants struggle to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx before them (to use another no-doubt disappearing idiom).

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.

How our elites brought us a war.

Your Tatler thanks a family member for alerting him to a superb essay in the Tablet, Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble, written by the always excellent Lee Smith, a veteran blogger-writer on the Internet. It’s fairly lengthy, complex and highly detailed, but essential reading if one wishes to gain a fuller understanding of the outrage and tragedy of the Russian invasion of of Ukraine.

Mr Smith argues the present war in Ukraine is the result of years of blundering by many, even Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. It should be noted though most of Zelensky’s mistakes were made with the encouragement of foreign affairs “experts” in the United States, who encouraged his desire making his country a big player in the international scene, an impossibility according to Smith. And who might those experts have been? A lot of familiar names crop up: Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and a whole lot more, but surprisingly, not the awful Samantha Power, who might have been too busy crafting the foolhardy Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran.

In the case of Ukraine, it seems every cockeyed policy these rogues dreamed up was to play the unfortunate country off Vladimir Putin, the goal being to inculcate in the dictator the notion Ukraine was a danger to him and Russia. In that, at least, they succeeded all too well and Putin is doing what any despot would do when feeling threatened.

Taking a step back to gaze on this staggeringly credentialed club (Blinken, Harvard, Columbia Law; Sullivan, Yale, Oxford; Nuland, Brown; Rice, Stanford, Oxford, Power, Yale) and others, similarly credentialed, one has to wonder how these people, so purportedly well educated, could pursue such foolish policies yielding such disastrous results. Certainly their near unanimous embrace of socialism and anti-Americanism, learned in college classrooms from former ’60s radicals, plays a significant part, but it’s still puzzling to your Tatler their astonishing incompetence; everything they have a hand in fails.

Should this country still be reasonably intact in 2024, the State Department and all other related government institutions must be scoured. Meanwhile, the privileged, spoiled elites in them now continue on their merry path of destruction. They bring to mind the poignant words near the end of The Great Gatsby concerning the rich and thoughtless Buchanans.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

The smart set says 2+2=5.

Instapundit alerts us to an article in Campus Reform announcing a stunning discovery by academics in America’s institutions of higher learning: traditional mathematics is racist. Apparently, certain pointy heads in academe are proposing that “objective mathematics is rooted in ‘white supremacist patriarchy’ and white social constructs.” Who knew?

In the article there is a fair amount of contemporary acadamese explaining it all, plus links for those who want still more, but truth be told, your Tatler, a hopeless throwback to the 20th Century, cannot make heads or tails of it (is that expression racist?), so will not post any of it here. One bit of advice, though. It might be a good idea to avoid bridges and tall buildings designed by graduates of engineering schools espousing such doctrine.