The Agrarian's Lament: The Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A reminder to that it is time to be the people that founded the country.

The Agrarian's Lament: The Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A reminder to that it i...:   The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument. : This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald...

The Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A reminder to that it is time to be the people that founded the country.

 

The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.: This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald Trump, which will go down as the most corrupt political era in U.S. h...

On the 250ths Anniversary of American Independence it'd do us well to recall that while the Revolution may have been lead by landed patricians, it was fought by landed yeoman.

It's a great misfortune to the country, or perhaps a timely reminder, of exactly how far we've fallen in that regard. We have, in the form of Donald J. Trump, a President, albeit an illegitimate one, who is the very symbol of what Americans rebelled against 250 years ago. This monumental palace coach should serve to remind us. 

Had Donald Trump been alive in 1776, he'd have been a Loyalist. 

At the end of the war he'd have been packed up to Canada to annoy the French, who at least would largely have not understood him.  Not, in his dementia, that we do either.

Washington on Blueskin.

George Washington owned his own mounts.  John Adams broke one of his own mounts as late as his 80s.  Taft kept a cow on the White House lawn.

Donald Trump flies back and forth to his golf resort in Florida on the American taxpayers dime.¹  And now, at the expense of some $400,000,000 taxpayer dollars, he's unveiled the new one, and gushes about its "luxury":

Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.

This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald Trump, which will go down as the most corrupt political era in U.S. history, it just can't be avoided.

The Federal Government, funded by the American taxpayers in the form of taxes, and by individuals and foreign governments in the form of loans, has taken delivery of one Boeing "VC-25B Bridge", a military conversion of a Boeing 747-8 originally built as a Boeing Business Jet.  The plane was delivered in 2012 to Qatar Amiri Flight and used by the House of Thani. In June 2023, it was delivered to Global Jet Isle of Man. The Qatari government gave it as a gift. . . if we assume governments really give gifts to other governments.  Poor little King Donny just wasn't happy with the existing Air Force One and given that he's in his last term he couldn't wait for new ones under construction to be completed.

After he leaves office, which given his advanced age and rapidly declining mental status is likely to be before his term expires, the airplane, which has cost the United States at least $400,000,000 in "upgrades" to make it work in its role as a royal coach for his majesty, will be transferred to his presidential library foundation.  Indeed, that will happen before his unfortunate illegitimate reign is over.

This is complete bullshit.

I've posted on this story, and this airplane, here before:

Air Force One.

Air Force One has been in the news a lot recently, and it  started before the Qatari proposal to give the United States, or Donald Trump (it isn't clear which) a luxury outfitted Boeing 747.

Technically "Air Force One" is a call sign, and merely denotes an airplane the Chief Executive is a passenger in.  If a President rode in an Air Force Cessna, that would be Air Force One.  But everyone knows that it refers to one of two Boeing VC-25s, militarized 747s, that are designated for the Presidents use.

RD-2

Interestingly, the first aircraft designated for Presidential use was a Navy airplane, an amphibious Douglas Dolphin RD-2 that was luxury outfitted for use by President Roosevelt.  It was used from 1933 to 1939, and obviously not for transglobal flight.  The President didn't really do extensive travel until World War Two.

Roosevelt's once used VC-54C.

In spite of concerns over commercial aviation being used to carry the President during the war, it was in fact used and it wasn 't until 1945 that a new designated Presidential aircraft was acquired, that being a  Secret Service reconfigured a Douglas C-54 Skymaster (VC-54C) which was named the Sacred Cow.  It contained a sleeping area, radiotelephone, and retractable battery-powered elevator to lift Roosevelt in his wheelchair. It's only use by Roosevelt was to fly the then dying President to Yalta.  Truman used it thereafter, but it was replaced by military DC-6 (VC-118) thereafter.

Truman's VC-118.

President Eisenhower, who of course knew planes well, to Lockheed C-121 Constellations, Columbine II and Columbine III. The Constellation was a very popular airplane at the time, and Douglas MacArthur also had one, that one spending many years after its service at the Natrona County International Airport on an abandoned runway.

Columbine II was the first Presidential aircraft to receive the designation Air Force One.

At the end of Eisenhower's Presidency Boeing 707s came in, in part because the Soviets were using a jet to transport their Premier.  707s remained through the Nixon era, giving good service in this role.

747s, as VC-25s, entered specialized manufacture for use as Air Force One during Reagan's administration, although the first one would enter service after that.  They've been used ever since.

These aren't normal 747s.  They are packed with communications and electronic warfare equipment in order to have combat survivability.  

Replacing the current two aircraft that are used as Air Force One is a topic that the Air Force started looking at quite a few years ago.  The 747 variant which the VC-25 isn't made anymore.  Production of 747s stopped in 2023 in favor of more modern aircraft.  Still, the airframe remains useful in this role, and after the Air Force started to look into options, updating a 747-8 appeared to be the best option.  Only Boeing was interested in the project anyway, and it will take a massive financial loss to do it.  

The aircraft that are being retrofitted for this role was built, originally, as a commercial airliner. The projected is a massive one, and the delivery date will be in 2027.

What the new Air Force Ones will look like.

Enter Qatar.

Qatar has offered to give the US (I guess) a luxury Boeing 747-8 for use as Air Force One until the other 747-8s are complete.  But here's the thing.  Boeing has been working on the complicated task fo converting the two existing 747-8s for this use for several years. After all, it's basically a combat aircraft.  All accepting the plane would do is give Boeing a third one to convert, which wouldn't be ready for years.

Trump is being childish about this, as he is about a lot of things.  He doesn't seem to grasp the nature of the aircraft, and likely a lot of other people don't as well.  In his case, this is inexcusable.  It's a combat airplane.

Frankly, it's a Cold War combat airplane.

Which gets to this.

The 747 was a big massive airliner in an era in which it was the queen of the sky. That era is over and airlines have moved on to more modern aircraft.  The world in which Ronald Reagan ordered 747s is gone as well.  It's still useful to have an aircraft that can be used in a global thermonuclear war, which is what it is, but that's not going to happen and it makes no sense to use it to go on weekend golfing trips to Florida.

But that's what Trump tends to use it for.

That raises an entire series of other questions, many of which have little to do with aircraft, but some of which do.  It's notable that other Presidents have used lighter aircraft for more mundane trips.  In November 1999, President Bill Clinton flew from Ankara, Turkey, to Cengiz Topel Naval Air Station outside Izmit, Turkey, aboard a marked C-20C.  In 2000, President Clinton flew to Pakistan aboard an unmarked Gulfstream III.  In 2003, President George W. Bush flew in the co-pilot seat of a Sea Control Squadron Thirty-Five (VS-35) S-3B Viking from Naval Air Station North Island, California to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with that latter obviously being an exception. Barack Obama used a Gulfstream C-37 variant on a personal trip in 2009.

Trump can use something else than a 747 for what he uses Air Force One for in almost every single instance.

Indeed, the entire topic brings up a lot of things about the risks of having an airplane like this, a luxury airliner inside, which is really a combat aircraft.  It makes it easy to forget what it really is, and it makes a President feel like an Emperor, which he is not.

So why am I doing it again?

Since May, 2025 Donald Trump has used the existing Air Force One to fly back and forth to his Florida golf home/resort, effectively using the airplane as a toy, repeatedly.  He's also used it for what are basically campaign trips.  He's launched an illegal war against Iran for which the Department of Defense now seeks $80,000,000,000 to cover, and which killed thirteen Americans and untold numbers of Iranians.  That war encouraged Israel to not only participate in it, or perhaps the other way around, but also to engage in an invasion of Lebanon.  He's spent something like $13,000,000 to Rhino Line the Washington D. C. reflecting pool, he's trying to build a massive ballroom that will ultimately cost the taxpayer one way or another, and he's trying to build a triumphal arch, making the United States the first country in the world to build an arch after getting solidly defeated in a war.

He's demented, and he acts like an emperor. This airplane is part of that delusion.

Truth be known, the entire Air Force One thing hasn't made sense for years.  Having some sort of aircraft available for Presidential use for Presidential work makes some limited sense. But most of what Trump uses the aircraft for could be achieved through commercial aviation.  Indeed, not one single trip Trump has taken could not have been accomplished that way.

And that's how this should be done.  Back when transpiration was by rail, the President didn't own a train.  When Trump goes over to the G7 to insult the Italian Prime Minister with his lunacy, that could be done by commercial air, and should be done that way.  And I mean commercial air, not chartered air.  The government could get him a ticket on a regularly scheduled flight.

And when he goes to Mar A Lago he can pay for his own ticket.

I know that the objections will be "oh my, it isn't safe".  That is, frankly, for the most part complete BS.  Trump could get a ticket on Ryan Air and be just as safe as anyone else. 

And if its a little less safe, that's a good thing.  One of the problems with the modern presidency is that the occupant of the White House is too insulated from the people he supposedly serves.  At one time the President shook the hands of all who lined up on New Years Day.  Not anymore.

If the President had to travel with the great unwashed masses maybe he'd be less of a lunatic.  Or maybe he'd just realize that its a real job.  

Anyway you look at it, Air Force One is a titanic waste of money.  The Air Force has aircraft.  If he needs to go, he can load up on a C5A with the equipment going wherever its going.  

And this waste of money is going to a Trump library just before Trump leaves office.

WTF?

If the US had to spend money on it, it should keep it.  This is appalling.  That should be addressed as soon as possible.  If there's a current way to address it, it just should be silently done.  Trump can leave office and his library, which frankly is a pointless thing in the first place, can buy a Revell model kit of a Boeing 747. This absurd flying castle can carry on in its existing role and join the two that are being built, or preferably at least one of those two contracts cancelled seeing as the US has this thing.

At that point, the signature on the under panel that Trump affixed yesterday can be fittingly modified, recalling World War Two nose art.  A realistic Trump nude torso doodle, a la Epstein, can be installed.  A fitting monument.

It's a gift form Qatar, an authoritarian, semi-constitutional hereditary emirate monarchy ruled by the House of Thani.  The Emir is the absolute authority.

Just the sort of government that King Donald can related to.  Apparently they could relate to him, or more likely, thought they could obtain some advantage by appealing to his pathetic vanity.

The plane will be transferred to his Presidential library before he leaves office.  What books would even appear in Donald Trump's library boggles the imagination.  He does not appear to be a well read man, or even really read anything.  Figures from his last administration related he had a hard time reading memos they gave him as he lost interest so rapidly.  He does not appear to be a smart man.²

And, current American worship of wealth aside, we shouldn't expect him to be.  What I've long suspected turns out to be true.  The wealthy are often stupid.

Does Being Rich Make You Stupid?

False consciousness goes upscale.

Billionaires Are Actually Less Intelligent Than Lower-Paid People New Study Shows

Does Having Too Much Money Make Us Stupid?

World’s Richest People May Actually Be Dumber Than Those Who Earn Less, Study Says

Luck and circumstance has plenty to do with it.

This actually doesn't surprise me at all.  The question is whether wealth makes you stupid, or encourages the breeding down of intelligence.  Either can be maintained.

It was Chesterton who noted that "AMONG the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."  There's something to that.  But beyond that, there's plenty of evolutionary evidence of the latter point.  Wild cattle are quite a bit smarter than domestic ones.  Wolves are smarter than dogs.  Wild turkeys are very smart birds whereas domestic ones, apparently are dumb as a post.

Cave drawing of an Aurochs.  Modern cows can be dicey, but aurochs wanted to kill you.

The question would be, of course, why this is true, and selective breeding by human beings largely explains it.  We'd rather not have a mean cow that seeks to break free, raising a gang of mean cows, and lay siege to the village.  Hunters and herdsmen like smart dogs, but bred to be fairly compliant. If you've ever owned a standard poodle, one of the oldest hunting breeds, you'll see how much of the wolf wasn't bread out of them, they think for themselves, we've worked a lot on dogs since then.  

French Poodle in the early 1900s. The coat may look weird but they're a hunting dog, and a German bred one.  Even now, the Puddle Dog has opinions on everything and isn't shy about giving you them. The only other modern hunting dog that rivals them that way is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, another old breed..

It's a dangerous thing to say, and contrary to the thesis advanced by eugenicists, but there's pretty good evidence that people on average were getting smarter and smarter all along throughout human history, in very real terms, up until just recently.  Evolution was forcing it.  Some evolutionary biologist argue that the homo sapien sapien of our current era is demonstrably smarter than homo sapiens of, say, 100,000 years ago. . . or 50,000 years ago. . . or 10,000 years ago, or 5,000.³   And it makes some sense.

In a normal, i.e., not rich, environment a lot of things go into mate selection, oh heck let's say spouse selection other than what goes into attracting people, oh heck let's say men, to Only Fans.  Love has always been an aspect of it, but its interesting to note how even when I was a teen, teenagers selected dates on character, which included intelligence, more than anything else.  It's funny to think of now, but if a guy had a "pretty" girlfriend, he was just considered lucky, and a girl with brains and other positive characteristics would have a boyfriend who featured the same, irrespective of her looks. When the girl was good looking, it was just sort of like winning a bonus prize.  Purely good looking girls, if that's all they had going for them, weren't really sought out.  

  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

This remained true, I'd note, throughout my entire single life.  Maybe it's largely true now.

But with the wealthy, it's another matter.

Future Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith and her first husband, Billy Ray Smith.  She was 17  and he was 16 when she married.  He was cook.  She changed her image enormously after they divorced and ended up married to an octogenarian after being a Playboy Centerfold and Guess Jeans model. Do we think that late union was a marriage for love on either side?  She paid the price, of course, dying young.  Her first husband is still alive, but never speaks much.  He was apparently crushed by the death of their son, pictured here, when he was in his twenties.  He never remarried.

Donald Trump, who gives no evidence of being an intelligent man, has been married three times, with each spouse having a certain sort of look save for one.  Two have been Slavic beauties of a certain sort, which means they present a certain look that certain people regard as glamorous beauty.⁴. The second, Marla Maples, actually presents as pretty smart. That marriage lasted six years.⁵

The point here?

I'm not thinking that a lot of the super rich determine their mates the way regular people do.  I don't think "is he/she a good helpmate?" or "do we have the same interests, faiths, worldview?", or to be really old school, "can this guy/gal help me around the farm?" has gone into it much.  Rather, they often seem to be chosen on looser characteristics that might more resemble how oriental potentates chose concubines for the harem, i.e., looks.

When Arab raiders stole Irish women, after all, smart as those women tend to be, they weren't marketing them on "look at this ginger. . . she's really got the brains!"

Now, a person can take this too far, but we live in a rich society.  The richest of us may in fact be stupider than the rest of us, or a lot of us.  And we collectively, just like a placid cow in the field, may be starting to get dumber overall.

We live in a materially very wealthy culture.  Even the average impoverished American is wealthier than many thought to be well off in former eras. And to add to that, the decay in morality, brought about by material wealth, which has allowed us to focus only on ourselves, has developed a self centered sexual culture that contributes to this.

Put another way, as one female observer seriously noted:

But its not making people happier.  People know something is wrong.

Gallup informs us that most Americans believe in the "American Dream", whatever that is, but that a very high percentage believe its unobtainable.

American Dream Endures as U.S. Approaches 250 Years

That's because it is unobtainable.

The American Dream has been defined in various ways.  I think it might be best defined in the film The Best Years Of Our Lives.

In that film there's a moment when discharged sergeant Fred Derry gives a loan to a discharged Navy vet who is a tenant farmer.  He wants to buy his own farm.  He knows he can do it.

That's the best description of the American Dream I've ever seen.

The real dream is to own your own.  And at the time of the American Revolution, most did. That's what had brought them to the country.

I don't know what they teach the young now, but when I was growing up it was a lot of crap about how people came over for freedom, mostly freedom of religion.

Yeah, some did, sort of. The best example might be the Puritans on the Mayflower, who were seeking freedom to worship in their own way and to tell everyone else in the world how they were supposed to do it.  If you were in a Puritan community you were worshipping with them or getting punished, severely.

Only about 1/3d of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans.  The rest were likely members of the Church of England which itself was less than 100 years separated from the Catholic Church, and even less separated from the Prayer Book Rebellion.⁶ Point is, those passengers, who were all part of the group that put in as they were out of beer, didn't come for religious freedom.

They came for land.

Land is, and was, independent.  People knew then, and they knew now, that land was independence, freedom, and a decent life worth living.  If you could obtain, as Chesterton would later put it, "three acres and a cow", or more likely 40, and a mule, you had it made.  You were not rich.  You were not poor. You were your own family.

Land is what caused Englishmen to risk their lives in 1607 to come to a new continent, or Frenchmen to come to it in 1608, or Spanish to come to it in 1565.  Here they could get it, at some cost, but a none the less obtainable one.  In Europe, they could not.  And if not all came as farmers, tradesmen who came, came because they could open their own shops, essentially operating on the same ideal.  Those who couldn't muster up the cash for transit indentured themselves to do so which, in spite of latter day white apologist, was not slavery.  It was a temporary means of getting started, in some ways like apprenticeships or joining the service operates for many today.

We cannot say that it was universally benign. That would be a lie. The land in fact already belonged to somebody else, the native inhabitants, whose claims were excused due to their rotational agricultural practices and low population density. But that doesn't change the basic fact.  It was land, not "freedom" of any type that drew the immigrant.

By moving, they freed themselves from some landowning overlord and made themselves independent farmers.  That dream lasted all the way up until the mid 20th Century in some fashion.  While it remains alive today, the truth is that the reality it of it is as dead, yielded to the bloated interests of the rich.  The largest landowner in the US today is billionaire sports and real estate mogul Stan Kroenke, who owns land in Wyoming.  Mom and pop shops have yielded to the nightmare created by Sam Walton.  

People who think the American dream is alive are largely fooling themselves.

Nonetheless, a dream is a dream, and revolutions are based on dreams.

The American Revolution was based on a landowning dream.  It wasn't, frankly necessarily wholly admirable.  The Intolerable Acts included, in a very real sense, the sense that the Crown was going to restrict the right of expanding countrymen's families to settle new lands, and they were right. The fear also was that the Crown would restrict economic activity in the Colonies for revenue purposes, and that was partially correct.  Common Sense and the like aside, a real cause of the Revolution was the native sense that the free right to settle land, and engage in small free enterprise, was the only thing that separated American Colonist form the English and European masses.

They were right, if not necessarily morally right.

A large number, maybe most, revolutions since that time, and some before it, have been based on the same cause. The French Revolution was not, and it remains a global oddball.  The Russian Revolution, failed as it was, is such an example, however, as was the Russian Revolution of 1905.  The Chinese Revolution of 1911, and the Chinese Civil War, both failed examples, also were.  The Mexican Revolution, also a failed revolution, very much was.

The Mexican Revolution provides, in fact, an excellent example.  Through every phase, from 1911 onwards, the rich landed class fought back, and when defeat arrived, they stepped aside and regrouped.  It kept the Revolution from really being successful.  Indeed, of all the revolutions we have noted, only the American Revolution was really successful.

But the success it created is dead.  Today,. we have the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks and other 1%ers that control the economy, and which some like Jonah Goldberg even feel we should celebrate (as to Musk).

Well, no.

Time for a second American revolution.

Not, we might note, one with guns.  Indeed, that would inevitably be not only immoral, but outright moronic, lead by people festooned with Second Amendment tattoos while advocating outright fascism.

No, something more radical than that, a revolution at the ballot box.

It's time to end the moronic celebration of a "free market system" that isn't free in any sense.  Corporate Capitalist are shoving pablum down the throats of the electorate while pocking the largess. Large-scale corporatism needs to end.

And so too does a weird millennialism appropriations of public lands by people like Deseret Mike Lee and pathetic fellow travelers like John Barrasso and Harriet Hageman.

A revolution can be had at the ballot box.  It won't happen all at once, but if started now the two party system can be ended, and the creation of wealth for the wealthy can be as well.  Remote land ownership, something the colonist came here to escape, can be as well.

It won't happen as long as people don't think.  But they need to think now.  At some point they will, and if we don't take on the yoke of this burden now, when the plow ox bulks, it'll be bad.

Footnotes

1.  Donald Trump is such a WASP, with the adherence to the "P", that he's converted some property in Washington D.C. to become a golf course and is putting in courses on some military bases.

Put in shooting ranges or something.  Not something that fat old white guys play.

2. The fact that Trump is a Wharton graduate is really a slam at the Ivy League. Yes, they have some great schools, but the system they operate in really has graduated some failures.  Pete Hegseth provides such an example.  

Wharton owes the country an apology, and I say that as somebody who has a relative that graduated from there. The fact that Trump graduated is applying. The fact that Chuck Gray is their product is as well.

3.  Some theologians have speculated that there was a point with our species when God converted us from just a smart hominid into what we are in the Divine Plan, with an immortal soul. The speculation is that it was the moment language arrived, and there's some archeological and biological evidence that moment was in fact sudden and radical.  

4. Frankly, Trump spouses 1 and 3 really aren't bombshells.  Melania is more properly characterized as "handsome".

5.  We can't really speculate on the smarts of 1 and particularly 3.  Melania is hard to figure as she's never obtained a really good command of English.  None the less, people who admire her, are frankly doing so willfully.

6. Recusant Catholics are estimated to be less than 5% of the English population at the time, which means that were likely to probably have actually been 10 to 15%.  Today, more Catholics attend weekly services in the UK than the established church.  Recently one Anglican convert in the UK described her transition as "going Full Fat Catholicism"

Thursday, February 12, 1925. Arbitration and Execution.

President Coolidge signed the Federal Arbitration Act into law, allowing contractual facilitation of resolving private disputes through arbitration.

For some reason, I don't see the GOP supporting that today.

Imperial Russia's last Prime Minister Nikolai Golitsyn was arrested by the Soviets.  He'd be tried and, of course, executed.

German miners in Dortmund stopped work in sympathy with the victims of the Stein mine explosion and a protest against dangerous mining conditions.

The Belgian airline SABENA (Societé anonyme belge d'Exploitation de la Navigation aérienne) started the air travel between Europe and Central Africa, the first airline to do so.  

Last edition:

Tuesday, February 10, 1925. A concordat.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Canada, Catholic, Diplomacy, fishing, Poland, United States

Tuesday, September 2, 1924. Glazman kills himself.

Mikhail Glazman, one of Leon Trotsky’s closest advisers during the Russian Civil War, killed himself after being expelled from the Communist Party by Stalin.

Often not put in real context, something that's commonly missed about the Communists coming into power was the unending sea of blood associated with it.  The rise of the Communists was bloody, the Russian Civil War was bloody, the Communist in power, even before they fully seized power was bloody, and before that quit flowing the Reds turned on other Reds, and on members of their own party.  Included in the bloody pool was the blood of people like Glazman, who killed themselves for any number of reasons, some just to avoid being killed by others.

Last edition:

Monday, September 1, 1924. The Dawes Plan goes into effect.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Automobile racing, Dawes Plan, Russian All-Military Union

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVI . To what extent is that new?

 A short thread just pondering some things in the news, or the zeitgeist, that are portrayed as "new".

1.  A war between Russia and Ukraine?

This is a horrible event, to be sure, but Russia's been trying to shove itself on Ukraine since 1917, or probably well before.

Russia is really like a giant bully in its neighborhood, which is why this is important.  It's not new.  Russia grabbed Ukraine back after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and then fought its guerrillas in the early 20s. It fought guerrillas again from 1943 into the 1940s.  Ukraine wants to be an independent state. Russia doesn't like any of the neighboring countries to have that status.

2. Adult children living at home.

This is constantly portrayed as new, but it's the historical norm due to limited resources.

It really only began to change in the 1930s, at first due to economic desperation. That trend was amplified by World War Two, and the massive economic boom after the war really changed the situation.

A constructing economy has reversed it, as it has. . . 

3.  Delayed marriage

Marriage ages have traditionally been higher than they were in the1940s to 1970s time frame.  The reason is noted above.

Related Threads:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. At War With Nature and the Metaphysical

Monday, March 5, 1923. Reds.

The Soviet Union, which claimed to respect the rights of nations, delivered a protest note to Finland over Finland's negotiations with the League of Nations over Karelia, which should have been Finland's.

Soviet barbarity would later assure that it ended up in the USSR, and then later in Russia.  A general Soviet policy of Russification, which settled lands with Russians, means that Karelians, a Finnic people, are now minorities in Russian Karelia.

On the same day, Lenin wrote Stalin on a personal matter.

Dear Comrade Stalin:

You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language. Although she had told you that she was prepared to forget this, the fact nevertheless became known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I have no intention of forgetting so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me as well. I ask you, therefore, to think it over whether you are prepared to withdraw what you have said and to make your apologies, or whether you prefer that relations between us should be broken off.

Respectfully yours,       

Lenin 

Lenin's wife was one Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was also a Bolshevik and very active in party affairs.  She's long out live her husband, dying in 1939, just before the start of World War Two.   

She managed to survive Stalin's purges, even intervening to attempt to save some condemned Reds.  No doubt her status as the wife of the original Red dictator insulated her from such attacks.

It's widely asserted that Nadezhda wasn't Lenin's only love interest, and that French Communist Inessa Armand was his mistress.  This is hard to prove, however, even though it is flatly asserted as being the case in many histories referencing Lenin.  They had met in France while Lenin was living there, and she came to Russia following the Revolution.  Becoming overworked in Revolutionary Russia, Lenin urged her to go to the Caucasus for a holiday, which was suffering from an epidemic and which still had armed opposition to Communism. Supposedly, Lenin was unaware of this.  She contracted cholera there and was buried in a mass grave at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, being the first woman to be accorded this dubious honor.

Igor Sikorsky, who felt Soviet barbarity, incorporated the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation in the U.S.

The state of Washington got around to adopting an official flag.

It's incredibly boring.

It's original appearance:

Still boring.

Casper read of railroads to be built, $1.00 gasoline, and the dangers of ardent wooing.

Thursday, October 26, 1972. "We believe that peace is at hand".

So stated Henry Kissinger publicly, and just eleven days prior to the 1972 Presidential Election.

Kissinger, Nixon and Alexander Haig at Camp David in 1972.

Nixon did not approve as he felt that Kissinger was hogging the limelight through the announcement, however Kissinger noted that the North Vietnamese had already published the text of the draft agreement.

Unbeknownst to the public, neither Nixon or Kissinger believed that the Republic of Vietnam had any chance of holding out long term against North Vietnam, and they were putting heavy pressure on the South Vietnamese, who had little faith in their abilities themselves to cooperate.

Igor Sikorsky, aviation giant and developer of helicopters, died on this day at age 83.

Sikorsky was born in Kyiv to Russian parents.  His father was an internationally known psychiatrist and his mother a physician, meaning he was born into an unusual family for the era.  He was drawn to aviation very early in his life and studied in Paris.  He worked in Paris during World War One and did not return to Russia due to the Russian Revolution, immigrating to the United States in 1919.  His first wife accordingly divorced him, as she remained in Russia with their daughter.  

Sikorsky's pioneering work in helicopters would end up being of enormous benefit to his adopted country, and his company still is a leader in heavy helicopters.

Friday, September 16, 1921. The Russian Immigrants

Refugees, no doubt, from the horrors of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

No names.  How did their story work out, and where are their descendants today?

February 28, 1921. The Kronstadt Rebellion.

Sailors had been an integral part of the Russian Revolution, and indeed they'd been an integral part of revolutions in Russia, and in Europe in general.  Revolutionary left wing sailors had revolted in Russia in 1904, 1905, 1906 and most importantly, in 1917.  Indeed, in some ways the rebellion of Russian sailors in 1917 had heralded the onset of the Russian Revolution.

All of which made the uprising that started on this day in 1921 a momentous one.  On this day, Russian sailors, taking the view that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Russian Revolution, rose up against the Communist government on the port island of Kronstadt, just off of St. Petersburg.

Communism was proving to be a disaster.  Indeed, it was such a disaster that even though the Reds had only defeated the Whites, as we now recognize that defeat, a couple of months prior, the unworkable oppressive nature of the Communist dictatorship was already apparent.  The sailors rebellion at Kronstadt was in reaction to that.

The sailors were not "White", but rather left wing revolutionaries themselves.  They were heavily influenced by a concept of localism that some regard as anarchistic, but which might be most analogous to the views of the Greens, who sought to allow individuals the greatest possible freedom in the economy and in their personal lives.  They expressed their goals in the form of fifteen published points.

These read:

Having heard the report of the representatives of the crews dispatched by the General Meeting of the crews from the ships to Petrograd in order to learn the state of affairs in Petrograd, we decided:

1. In view of the fact that the present soviets do not represent the will of the workers and peasants, to re-elect the soviets immediately by secret voting, with free canvassing among all workers and peasants before the elections.

2. Freedom of speech and press for workers, peasants, Anarchists and Left Socialist Parties.

3. Freedom of meetings, trade unions and peasant associations.

4. To convene, not later than 1 March 1921, a non-party conference of workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd City, Kronstadt and Petrograd Province.

5. To liberate all political prisoners of Socialist Parties, and also all workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors who have been imprisoned in connection with working-class and peasant movements.

6. To elect a commission to review the cases of those who are imprisoned in jails and concentration camps.

7. To abolish all Political Departments, because no single party may enjoy privileges in the propagation of its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead of these Departments, locally elected cultural-educational commissions must be established and supported by the state. This is the reason for the inclusion of this document in a collection otherwise devoted entirely to official publications.

8. All ‘cordon detachments” are to be abolished immediately.

9. To equalize rations for all workers, harmful sectors being excepted.

10. To abolish all Communist fighting detachments in all military units, and also the various Communist guards at factories. If such detachments and guards are needed they may be chosen from the companies in military units and in the factories according to the judgment of the workers.

11. To grant the peasant full right to do what he sees fit with his land and also to possess cattle, which he must maintain and manage with his own strength, but without employing hired labor.

12. To ask all military units and also our comrades, the military cadets, to associate themselves with our resolutions.

13. We demand that all resolutions be widely published in the press.

14. To appoint a traveling bureau for control.

15. To permit free artisan production with individual labor.

The resolutions were adopted by the meeting unanimously, with two abstentions.

President of the Meeting, PETRICHENKO.

Secretary, PEREPELKIN.

Suffice it to say, their rebellion would not be a success.  Some have noted that it hastened the implementation of Lenin's New Economic Order, but that program itself was only intended to be temporary and indeed, given Lenin's death, it certainly proved to be.

Some regard the Kronstadt Rebellion as the final practical act of the Russian Civil War.  By this point in time the Whites had been defeated in western Russia and, to a large degree, their defeat in the East was a foregone conclusion.  The rebellion, however, represented a dangerous internal threat from the left.  Had it succeeded, which it always had very little chance of doing, it would have created a more democratic left wing Russian regime, although one that was still likely to be a radical one.

On the same day, Panamanian troops halted an advance by Costa Rica in a border war that had developed between the two nations.  U.S. troops landed in Panama City to protect U.S. interest in that nation, which obviously were centered on the Canal.

France mustered troops, including colonial troops, on the German border in anticipating of occupying the Ruhr due to the failure of Germany to provide timely reparation payments.

January 30, 1921. Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodoronova of Russia laid to rest.

Funeral ceremony over the remains of Princess Elizabeth, sister of the Czarina and her maid, in the Russian Church of the Magdalene on the Mt. of Olives. Jan. 30th, 1921

Elizabeth of Hesse and By Rhine, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Elizabeth Feodoronova of Russia, was interred on this day at the Russian Church of the Magdalene on the Mount Of Olives.

She had been murdered on July 18, 1918 by the Communists.

She married into the Russian royal family prior to her younger sister, Alix, who became the Czarina.  Indeed, she met the future Czar Nicholas at the wedding of Elizabeth and Sergei, a Russian Grand Duke.  Sergei and Elizabeth were both deeply religious and while Elizabeth had been born Lutheran, she converted, as would Alix, to Russian Orthodoxy.  Sergei was assassinated by a Russian socialist radical in 1905 and Elizabeth did not remarry.   Reflecting her sincere religious nature, she thereafter sold all of her possessions, including her wedding ring, and became a Russian Orthodox nun.

She arrested with members of her family upon the orders of Lenin.  The Cheka murdered her and others by beating them, throwing them in a shaft, and tossing in hand grenades. When even that failed to kill them, evidenced by strains of a Russian Orthodox hymn being sung from below, the shaft was torched.

She was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1981.

January 11, 1921. Fractured and Rescued Russian Lives, 1921 Wyoming Legislature, Work.

Six of the seven Russian children adopted by Admiral Newton A. McCully, with their "governess" Eugenia Z. Selifanova, photographed on January 11, 1921.  

On this day in 1921, a press photographer photographed most of Admiral Newton A. McCully's adopted Russian children together with their governess who was a teenager herself.

McCully was a southern born American naval officer who had been embedded in the Imperial Russian Army during the Russo Japanese War.  In 1914 he returned to Russia as a naval attache and he was elevelted to commend of the U.S. Navy in northern Russia in 1918.  Following this he was sent to appreciate the military situation of the Whites in 1919.  He adopted these children in 1920.

McCully obviously appreciated the East due to all of this service.  A bachelor until 1927, he married Olga Krundycher, an Estonian, in 1929 on the claim that this would provide a mother for his children, and perhaps that was his reason, although I suspect that there was more to it than that.  She was later listed as their mother on census forms, even though the McCully adoptees were not all related and came themselves from varying regions of the former Russian Empire.  She was 29 years old at the time and the marriage took place in Tallinn, Estonia at which time McCully was still a serving naval officer.  He would live until 1951, dying at age 83.  She would live until 1968 and returned to Estonia for reasons of which I am not aware (or am I aware of when that occurred).

Eugenia  Selifanova was 18 or 19 years old when this photograph was taken. She later married another Russian immigrant, about 20 years her senior, and lived the rest of her life in Dearborn, Michigan. She had two children by the marriage and died in 1952.   She's already left the family, and probably had married, but the time of Admiral McCully's marriage.  Indeed, at that time McCully's mother was tasked with minding the children when he was away on duties.

It's easy to see what became of some of the children and that they had long American lives.  I wonder if anything of their early origins and culture was retained at all, or if anything of it remains in their ancestors.

On January 11, 1921, the United States severed all further participation in foreign councils, including the council that made up the Allied powers during World War One.

Also on this day in 1921, Wyoming's legislature convened for the 1921 session, as we reported in Today In Wyoming's History: January 11:  1921.   The 1921 legislative session for Wyoming commenced.

And, in an era before Social Security, this elderly gentleman was photographed at work.

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