Wed 01 Feb 2023 12:19:29 PM CST Happy National Serpent Day I can't vouch for the accuracy of the source, but here it is. Serpents are intriguing, mainly for their historical symbolism relative to humanity. As pets they are not my favorites, as reptiles to, turtles and lizards having preferred status. I've known a handful of people who kept snakes (small ones in glass tanks) and while the variety of appearance is interesting, not much else is. Both turtles and lizards kept thus quickly assess their environment and associate the appearance of a homo sapiens near the tank as being associated with food, much like a cat hearing the can opener or seeing the approaching human bearing food. I once kept four juveniles - a red-ear slider, a softshell, snapper, and a musk for a summer, returning them to nature before winter. Perhaps if my health is sufficiently restored I would keep aquaria again, and maybe some small turtles or lizards. The small ponds on my place have a healthy population and returning the reptiles to the place of their birth would be possible. When the aforementioned specimens lived with me, the slider and the softshell quickly learned that my arrival might indicate the arrival of food and left their basking position (a large flat rock in the center of the tank) and trod water at the glass. The snapper didn't pay much attention, but would enter the water later. The musk never reacted. Enough reptiles for now. I encountered the notorious photographs above at an age at which most are subject to the fraud. The execution of the insurgent by the Saigon Police Chief was in 1968, and being still safe for another half-dozen years from being conscripted for duty in Vietnam my perception of the affair was shaped by the conflicting sources (both wrong but one more wrong than the other) of my teachers and my parents and older generation in my family. My parents grew up in pre-mid WWII era, and the knowledge of the dark cancer growing in society was not yet apparent. My father served in WWII, an uncle served in Korea, and a cousin some years older had perished in Vietnam in 1966. He was on his second tour and his only child was born afer he left on that tour. But we believed the was was just and necessary to stop the world from being overrun by communism. The Kennedy affair had raised some suspicions, particularly as LBJ accelerated the destrucion of society, but we regarded that as incompetence and garden-variety corruption, not suspecting that the big picture even existed. Of course MLK bought it that year, probably because of his simultaneous inconvenience to LBJ and his usefulness to his movement, which he probably never knew he had lost control of, or more likely never realized he was a pawn. But the current adult generation was as yet oblivious to the danger. Thus the photo of General Loan dispensing a richly deserved justice to a man who had just murdered three generations of the family of a South Vietnamese officer became a propaganda tool for the left. Most of my high school teachers included. Yes, in 1968 my small-town high school was infested with commies. Mostly it was the old ones, english and history teachers, and those of related subjects (government, civics, etc.) who were likely indoctrinated in the first post-WWII wave of Communist proselytization. Some of them were fairly bright (not brilliant - my elite class of 20 cherry-picked students had only three to five actually brilliant types, and we were outcasts in that group of social 'elites') but not bright enough to have escaped the conditioning once they were out of college. The school administration was at least sufficiently awake at the time that when an agitator from Chicago tried to provoke all sorts of mischief (including race riots) in our little town his contract wasn't renewed. But the leftist virus spread, and few escaped it. The Kent State affair was a couple of years later (1970) and was, like the Vietnam photo the girl in the street photo was disseminated as a symbol of the evil government murdering peacefully protesting citizens. I am no more convinced fifty years later that it wasn't staged. Not that I blame the teenaged kid, she was apparently in a pretty confused state, but the fact that she was a runaway from Florida who happened to be there was not reported or even widely known for quite a while. It was portrayed as a college student grieving over a murdered kid. Obviously the affair was a debacle, brought on by panic as college campi were on fire all over the country, again organized at a higher level, as a little research shows. But the events that preceded it were barely reported at all, especially afterwards. Among there things, the "protesters" had burned down the ROTC building a few days earlier. When they had difficulty in getting a fire going, the "news media" personnel on the scene offered helpful suggestions. So the communists created a volatile situation and the inexperienced state government made errors. Of course four dead kids was just what the commies wanted. Text in the pics: Links Vox Popoli Enak's HypCryme blog MacArthur's Freehold Community Hospital Corporation Plano Texas A Dirty Rotten Shame Victims of ACCH   Last updated: Mon 30 Jan 2023 07:18:48 PM CST : 1675127928