Forgetting The Basics

Many years ago, I had subscriptions to the UK’s Country Life and Country Squire  magazines, which, as their names suggest, are dedicated to that country’s rich rural heritage.  Yes, I know the mags’ main emphasis was (and still is) dedicated to the landed gentry, but the mags also contain gems, like this one from Country Squire :

We walk on concrete, but we live on bread. The modern world hums with the illusion of self-sufficiency – our smartphones deliver groceries with a tap, restaurants materialize meals on demand, and supermarkets present endless abundance as if by nature’s own hand. Yet this is a collective delusion.

The truth is simpler, starker: every society rests upon the bowed backs of farmers. They are the uncelebrated linchpin holding civilization together, performing work so fundamental we’ve forgotten to see it.

Their labor defies romanticism. Farming is not some bucolic idyll; it is mathematics written in mud and sweat. A farmer must be gambler and scientist, prophet and laborer – calculating risks against fickle weather, coaxing growth from stubborn soil, fighting entropy itself just to keep the fields productive. One missed frost, one unseen blight, and a year’s work vanishes. Meanwhile, they’re patronized by 5-days-a-week urbanites who’ve never dug a ditch, who speak of ‘sustainability’ between takeaway lattes, who’d starve in a week if the lorries stopped running.

And for what?

To watch agribusiness conglomerates and supermarket oligarchs siphon away the profits? To hear deadbeat politicians lecture them about ‘efficiency’ while folding to trade deals that undercut their livelihoods? To be treated as quaint relics in a world that venerates guff videos on TikTok?

There’s more, much more in the piece, and I urge you all to read it.


There’s unexpected humor, too.  This from Country Life:

And of course, there’s property:

…a snip, at only $120,000 a year rental.

Memorial Day

Charles Loxton was a small man, no taller than 5’6”, and was born in 1899.  This means that when he fought in the muddy trenches of France during the First World War, he was no older than 17 years old — Delville Wood, where he was wounded, took place in July 1916.

Seventeen years old.  That means he would have been a little over sixteen when he enlisted. In other words, Charles must have lied about his age to join the army — many did, in those days, and recruiting officers winked at the lies.  After all, the meat grinder of the Western Front needed constant replenishment, and whether you died at 17, 18 or 19 made little difference.

Why did he do it?  At the time, propaganda told of how the evil Kaiser Wilhelm was trying to conquer the world, and how evil Huns had raped Belgian nurses after executing whole villages.  Where Charles lived as a young boy, however, the Kaiser was no danger to him, and no German Uhlans were going to set fire to his house, ever.

But Charles lied about his age and joined up because he felt that he was doing the right thing.  That if good men did nothing, evil would most certainly win.

It’s not as though he didn’t know what was coming:  every day, the newspapers would print whole pages of casualty lists, the black borders telling the world that France meant almost certain death.  The verification could be found in all the houses’ windows which had black-crepe-lined photos of young men, killed on the Somme, in Flanders, in Ypres, and at Mons.

He would have seen with his own eyes the men who returned from France, with their missing limbs, shattered faces and shaky voices.  He would have heard stories from other boys about their relatives coming back from France to other towns — either in spirit having died, or else with wounds so terrible that the imagination quailed at their description.

He would have seen the mothers of his friends weeping at the loss of a beloved husband.  Perhaps it had been this man and not his father who had taught him how to fish, or how to shoot, or how to cut (from the branches of a peach tree) a “mik” (the “Y”) for his catapult.

But Charles, a 16-year-old boy, walked out of his home one day and went down to the recruiting center of the small mining town, and joined the Army.

When years later I asked him why he’d done it, he would just shrug, get a faraway look in his blue eyes, and change the subject.  Words like duty, honor, country, I suspect, just embarrassed him. But that didn’t mean he was unaware of them.

So Charles joined the Army, was trained to fight, and went off to France.  He was there for only four months before he was wounded.  During the attack on the German trenches at Delville Wood, he was shot in the shoulder, and as he lay there in the mud, a German soldier speared him in the knee with his bayonet, before himself being shot and killed by another man in Charles’ squad.  At least, I think that’s what happened — I only managed to get the story in bits and pieces over several years.  But the scars on his body were eloquent witnesses to the horror: the ugly cicatrix on his leg, two actually (where the bayonet went in above the knee and out below it), and the star-shaped indentation in his shoulder.

The wounds were serious enough to require over a year’s worth of extensive rehabilitation, and they never really healed properly.  But Charles was eventually passed as fit enough to fight, and back to the trenches he went.  By now it was early 1918 — the Americans were in the war, and tiny, limping Private Charles Loxton was given the job as an officer’s batman: the man who polished the captain’s boots, cleaned his uniform, and heated up the water for his morning shave every day.  It was a menial, and in today’s terms, demeaning job, and Charles fought against it with all his might.  Eventually, the officer relented and released him for further line service, and back to the line he went.

Two months later came the Armistice, and Charles left France for home, by now a grizzled veteran of 19.  Because he had been cleared for trench duty, he was no longer considered to be disabled, and so he did not qualify for a disabled veteran’s pension.

When he got back home, there were no jobs except for one, so he took it.  Charles became, unbelievably, a miner.  His crippled knee still troubled him, but he went to work every day, because he had to earn money to support his mother, by now widowed, and his younger brother John.  The work was dangerous, and every month there’d be some disaster, some catastrophe which would claim the lives of miners.  But Charles and his friends shrugged off the danger, because after the slaughter of the trenches, where life expectancy was measured in days or even hours, a whole month between deaths was a relief.

But he had done his duty, for God, King and country, and he never regretted it.  Not once did he ever say things like “If I’d known what I was getting into, I’d never have done it.”  As far as he was concerned, he’d had no choice — and that instinct to do good, to do the right thing, governed his entire life.

At age 32, Charles married a local beauty half his age.  Elizabeth, or “Betty” as everyone called her, was his pride and joy, and he worshipped her his whole life.  They had five children.

Every morning before going to work, Charles would get up before dawn and make a cup of coffee for Betty and each of the children, putting the coffee on the tables next to their beds.  Then he’d kiss them, and leave for the rock face.  Betty would die from multiple sclerosis, at age 43.

As a young boy, I first remembered Charles as an elderly man, although he was then in his late fifties, by today’s standards only middle-aged.  His war wounds had made him old, and he had difficulty climbing stairs his whole life.  But he was always immaculately dressed, always wore a tie and a hat, and his shoes were polished with such a gloss that you could tell the time in them if you held your watch close.

Charles taught me how to fish, how to cut a good “mik” for my catapult, and watched approvingly as I showed him what a good shot I was with my pellet gun.  No matter how busy he was, he would drop whatever he was doing to help me — he was, without question, the kindest man I’ve ever known.

In 1964, Charles Loxton, my grandfather, died of pulmonary phthisis (tuberculosis), the “miner’s disease” caused by years of accumulated dust in the lungs.  Even on his deathbed in the hospital, I never heard him complain — in fact, I never once heard him complain about anything, ever.  From his hospital bed, all he wanted to hear about was what I had done that day, or how I was doing at school.

When he died, late one night, there was no fuss, no emergency, no noise; he just took one breath, and then no more.  He died as he had lived, quietly and without complaint.

From him, I developed the saying, “The mark of a decent man is not how much he thinks about himself, but how much time he spends thinking about others.”

Charles Loxton thought only about other people his entire life.

In Memoriam

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

…and in today’s story, a reminder:  “Never Bring An Axe To A Gunfight“:

In Duplin County, NC an alleged intruder trying to break through a back door with an axe died after homeowners opened fire, shooting him numerous times.  Deputies arrived on scene to find David Bradley White “lying on his back at the bottom of some steps with multiple gunshot wounds.”  White was pronounced dead at the scene.

“Numerous times” heheheheh….

And as this happened in rural North Carolina, the cops patted the shooters on the back, thanked them for saving the cost of a trial, rolled up the late choirboy and stuck him in the trunk, and left.

Amen, Kid

I can understand  an Olde Phartte  someone from my generation banging on about how the Yoof Of Today are hopeless wankers when it comes to education and being taught in the classroom.  (And yes, I use the word “wanker” in its most appropriate sense, as you will see later.)

But when a 26-year-old teacher gets all ranty on the above topic… well.

“These kids don’t know how to read,” she says flatly. “Because they’ve had things read to them, or they can just click a button and have something read out loud. Their attention spans are waning. Everything is high stimulation. They can scroll in less than a minute.”

And:

Teenagers who refuse to write even a paragraph, who throw tantrums when asked to handwrite an assignment, who beg to ‘just type it’ – not to save time or effort but to copy and paste answers from the internet or use AI to do the thinking for them.

She believes the behavior of her high schoolers is only part of the problem. What worries her is the sense that this generation, raised on screens, simply doesn’t care about anything whether it be learning, literacy or even the basics of society.

“They don’t care about making a difference in the world. They don’t care how to write a resume or a cover letter. They just have these devices in their hands that they think will get them through the rest of their life.

“They want to use [technology] for entertainment. They don’t want to use it for education.”

Hence my use of the term “wankers”:  self-pleasuring little wastrels.

Her solution?

“I think we need to cut off technology from these kids probably until they go to college,” she says. “Call me old-fashioned, but I just want you to look at the test scores. Look at the literacy rates. Look at the statistics. From when students didn’t use technology… to now.

“If you can’t read and you don’t care to read… you’re never going to have real opinions. You’ll never understand why laws and government matter. You’ll never know why you have the right to vote.”

By George… I think she’s got it.  And I repeat:  this isn’t some Olde Phartte like me;  she’s Gen Z, FFS.  And if someone in that group is starting to despair about the future generation…

She’s quitting teaching.  At age 26.

Somebody somewhere needs to give her a job — in a proper school, run as she describes it — because this is a lovely seed just waiting to grow.  She shouldn’t be wasted, because gawd knows there aren’t that many like her.

Cornerstone, Dislodged?

Looks like the Trumpistas are aiming their harpoons at another whale:

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency will review the agency’s endangerment finding — the “holy grail of the climate change religion” that has created over a trillion dollars in regulatory impact.

Wut dat?  Breitbart explains:

The finding stated that greenhouse gas emissions are an alleged threat to public health and welfare.

And when you look at the data which supposedly supports the finding, it, like most other “environmental” data, is a bunch of codswallop.

The EPA proceeded in an unorthodox manner. Slicing and dicing the language of the statute, it made an “endangerment finding” totally separate from any actual rulemaking-setting standards for emissions from cars. EPA argued it had the authority to do this because Congress didn’t specifically forbid it from taking this approach. By taking this approach, the endangerment finding intentionally ignored costs of regulations that EPA knew would follow from the finding — and indeed ignored any other policy impacts of those regulations.

Results (that you or I would care about)?

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, said that the EPA regulations that arose from the endangerment finding have contributed to automobile prices to rise from $23,000 in 2009 to nearly $50,000 now.

The EPA has relied on the endangerment finding for seven vehicle regulations that reportedly have an aggregate cost of more than one trillion dollars, according to the agency’s own regulatory impact analyses. 

We all knew that enviro-bullshit was behind so much of the price increases — that, and the raft of “safety” regulations that accompanied them.

My message to Sec. Lee Zeldin:

Get rid of that stuff.

Me, I’d like to see the FedGov refund some of that trillion-dollar price increase to everyone who bought cars and trucks — internal-combustion-driven cars and trucks, that is — from 2009 until today.

Why?  Because it was taken from these buyers by government malfeasance.

And if our current government wants to “claw back” some of that money from the people and organizations who instigated this swindle, that would be fine, too.