Monthly Archives: August 2025

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Of Intrepid Men and Their Flying Machines

The plane was flying 3500 ft. above the vast Atlantic Ocean.

“Then, just as he was looking at the needle of the air-speed indicator, it froze in front of his eyes. He could smell smoke. Its sensor, mounted above his head, had become packed with sleet and jammed. The indicator was now useless. The turbulent wind made the aircraft sway and judder…To try to get his equilibrium back, he drew back the control column, hoping to pull the nose up. The aeroplane hung motionless for a second. Then it fell into a steep spiral dive.”

Charles A. Lindbergh in a single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in May 1927, trying to complete the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight?

Negative. 

It was eight years earlier in May 1919. The courageous pilot was Jack Alcock, a British aviator flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines. Alcock was trying to complete a nonstop flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland. Accompanying him as navigator was Arthur Whitten Brown. Brown, nicknamed “Teddy,” was born in Glasgow, Scotland, though his parents were Americans.

Alcock and Brown’s modified Vickers Vimy bomber

I’ve admired Lindbergh since I was a child, thrilled at his derring-do, self-reliance and a triumph of will against the odds. (Yes, I know he also had some less than admirable qualities) On a trip to Hawaii as an adult, I even made a special trip to visit his grave at the end of the road to Hana under the shade of a Java plum tree at Palapala Ho‘omau Church on Maui. I’ve read multiple books about Lindbergh, who became a sensational and lasting celebrity, and I always thought, as most Americans likely do, that he was the first to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight.

Then I came across a fascinating, dramatic, fast-paced book published in 2024, The Big Hop, by David Rooney. 

At a time when there seems to be few real heroes, Rooney’s compelling account reveals that Alcock and Brown, both veterans of WW I, were among a hardy group of men who took on the challenge of a contest sponsored by Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Daily Mail newspaper. Northcliffe   offered a £10,000 prize to the first aviators to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.

Alcock and Brown were no strangers to peril. Alcock had fought in multiple terrifying dogfights during WWI, earning a Distinguished Service Cross. Brown, captured by the Germans in 1915 after crashing his Flying Corps B.E.2c biplane in northeastern France during WWI, endured atrocious conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps. The camps, often run by sadistic commanders, offered scandalously meagre food rations, were often freezing, swarming with rats and mice, and were inattentive to the multiple injuries and health issues suffered by POWs.

To be eligible for Northcliffe’s prize, competitors had to comply with three basic conditions: the flight had to be between any point in Great Britain and any point in Canada, Newfoundland or the United States; the flight had to be non-stop; the flight had to be completed within 72 hours.

Three teams joined Alcock and Brown in Newfoundland to make the attempt at a continuous Atlantic crossing:

  • Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve in a single engine Sopwith Atlantic
  • Frederick Raynham and C. W. F. Morgan in a single-engined Martinsyde Raymor
  •  A team led by Mark Kerr in a four-engined Handley Page V/1500 bomber Atlantic
Hawker’s Sopwith Atlantic

Hawker had a successful takeoff and managed to fly about 1000 miles, but the Sopwith’s engine failed and the plane went down in the ocean about 750 miles from Ireland. Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve were rescued by a Danish steamer, the SS Mary.

Raynham and Morgan’s plane crashed on takeoff on Newfoundland, likely due to a heavy fuel load and rough terrain.

Raynham and Morgan’s Martinsyde Raymor

Mark Kerr’s team abandoned their attempt at a transatlantic crossing after Alcock and Brown successfully crossed the Atlantic.

Mark Kerr’s Handley Page V/1500 bomber Atlantic

Alcock later said that when his  modified Vickers Vimy bomber fell into a steep spiral dive during the transatlantic flight, the plane “began to perform circus tricks”—plunging toward the ocean while he fought desperately to remain aloft. One moment the altimeter read 1,000 feet, the next only 100. When they were just 65 feet above the waves, he succeeded in regaining control.

On 15 June 1919 a telegram from Alcock and Brown arrived at the Royal Aero Club with the message: ‘Landed Clifden, Ireland, at 8.40 am Greenwich mean time, June 15, Vickers Vimy Atlantic machine leaving Newfoundland coast 4.28 pm GMT, June 14, Total time 16 hours 12 minutes. Instructions awaited.’ 

As David Rooney wrote in The Big Hop, “Today, a transatlantic flight is an unremarkable part of everyday life. It is almost a chore. But somebody had to go first.”

The Vickers Vimy that Alcock and Brown flew on display in the London Science Museum

Memorials at Clifden and London’s Heathrow International Airport also commemorate their achievement.

A statue of Alcock & Brown. Originally on display at Heathrow Airport, it was relocated at the Heathrow Academy but was moved to Clifden in Ireland on 7 May for an eight-week stay to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the flight on 15 June.

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ICE Creating High Crime DC Trump Deplores

The Free Press is reporting that D.C. police department supervisors have been under pressure to manipulate crime data to make it appear that violent crime has fallen compared to years past, according to the police union. ​

​“ ‘When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,’ Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said.” Sure, someone’s killed their girlfriend and is waving a gun in the air, but have you considered reporting it as a speeding ticket? The house has been broken into and the children are missing, but disorderly conduct has a better ring to it, I think. One police commander who allegedly changed crime data has been put on leave over it.

But wait a minute. Remember the guy, Sean Charles Dunn, 37, who was arrested for throwing a sandwich at an ICE agent in D.C.?

Daina Henry, a local transit police detective, detailed the altercation in a criminal complaint, alleging Dunn pointed his finger in the officer’s face and yelled, ‘Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city,’ minutes before ‘winding his arm back and forcefully throwing a sub-style sandwich’

Dunn has been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and employees of the United States – a felony. The charge could mean prison time and significant fines.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a social media post Thursday that Dunn had been fired from his job as an international affairs specialist in the Justice Department’s criminal division. She then unleashed a diatribe on the incident. You’d think Dunn was a mass shooter. 

“If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you,” Bondi said in a post on the social media platform X. “I just learned that this defendant worked at the Department of Justice — NO LONGER. Not only is he FIRED, he has been charged with a felony. This is an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ. You will NOT work in this administration while disrespecting our government and law enforcement.”

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host, chimed in as well. “Let me be clear, if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, be certain we will come after you with the full weight of the law.,” Pirro said. “Our officers have a job to do, and they should not be abused in the process. This alleged assault is no joke – it’s a serious crime, and those who think otherwise will learn just how gravely mistaken they are.”

So much for charging people with a lesser offense to make it appear that violent crime has fallen in the nation’s capital. 

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Misguided Charity: Portland’s Proposed Pearl District Homeless Shelter

There’s a saying of uncertain providence, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”. 

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson wants to give the homeless in the Pearl District a fish. 

Wilson wants to turn an industrial building at NW 15th Avenue and NW Northrup Street into a so-called “low-barrier” overnight-only homeless shelter able to accommodate up to 200 people. An all-night warehouse for the homeless. According to the NW Examiner last month, the city and property owner Vanessa Sturgeon of Sturgeon
Development Partners signed a 12-year lease in May that Mayor Keith Wilson has described as a two-or-three-year
deal. The $18,000-a-month lease covers the main floor and part of a basement, a total of 16,000 square feet, to be used only for shelter for unhoused individuals.

Low-barrier means the people who stay there from 8pm to 6am wouldn’t have to show an ID, be sober (there’s be no sobriety checks) or drug-free, although alcohol and drugs would not be allowed. The 200- bed shelter at Northwest 15th will have only two showers and sex offenders will be allowed inside the low- barrier shelter because no one will be checking for IDs.

A critic posted on reddit: “It’s basically a night prison. 200 people, 6 toilets, low barrier, barely a snack, no meals, no counseling, no fresh clothing. And then they are going to “disperse” these people every morning near parks and schools.”

Potential overnighters could access a bed by standing in line before the shelter  opened. At a July 28, 2025, public forum at the Armory, Skyler Brocker-Knapp, who oversees the city’s shelter plan, said people will be handed a card with information about where to receive social services after leaving the shelter.

I still remember going to a free lunch for the homeless program in an underground Portland parking garage a number of years ago. Tables spread out across the center of the garage displayed a bounty of meal options put together by multiple well-meaning social justice volunteers, from sandwiches and lasagna to potato chips and hot ethic dishes. Homeless people streamed in, wearily assembled in slow-moving lines, grabbed hold of what they wanted and found a spot on the concrete floor to sit and eat.

It wasn’t uplifting. It was depressing.

Nobody was there to help the struggling people get their lives back on track, to inquire about the welfare of their children, or to make them aware of accessible pathways towards lasting change. The whole thing was a misguided feel-good effort at charity by naïve good Samaritans. 

More recently, I saw a group of fresh-faced, eager suburban teenage girls handing out sandwiches from the trunk of their car to homeless people at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. That might have eased their consciences, but how, exactly, did that drive change?

As Kevin Dahlgren has noted in his Substack, @truthonthestreets, “We don’t have a homeless crisis; we have a mental health and addiction crisis. Unfortunately, many still treat the homeless crisis as if it’s a housing crisis and push for more and more shelter beds. The problem is these shelters are far too low a level of care for the majority of our mentally ill.”

“Many advocates for the homeless assume that homelessness is primarily due to the unaffordability of housing, rather than drug use, antisocial behavior, criminal activity or mental illness,” says Devon Kurtz, director of public safety policy at the conservative Cicero Institute. “From this assumption flows misguided confidence that living on the street is an unfortunate but preferable alternative to institutions that curb the civil liberties of individuals who are simply poor.  This assumption is wrong. In the largest survey of homeless Americans ever conducted, only 4% cited high housing costs as the primary reason they were homeless. Significant majorities said they had mental-health issues, had used illegal substances and had been to jail or prison for extended periods.”

A woman who directed a social service agency in the Portland area that served low-income families once told me the whole free food approach was “antiquated”, a long-ago discredited tactic , and that unrestricted aid was counterproductive.

So’s the proposed low-barrier Pearl District homeless shelter. 

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Another Extremist Trump Appointment

The Pacific Northwest is in the national news with the appointment of Washington State’s Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.

The Center, which is charged with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats, leads the way for the government in analyzing, understanding, and responding to the terrorist threat.. Of course the supine Republican-led Senate confirmed Kent’s appointment on Wednesday, with only one Republican, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voting against Kent’s nomination to the role.

Joe Kent (Photo credit: Jenny Kane/Associated Press)

Kent initially went to Washington, D.C. in early 2025 when he was picked to be Chief of Staff for Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.

Kent has said he plans to devote the Center’s resources to targeting Latin American gangs and other criminal groups tied to migration. “President Trump is committed to identifying these cartels and these violent gang members and making sure that we locate them and that we get them out of our country,” Kent said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee in April.

Kent ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in Washington state’s Third Congressional District twice, once in 2022 and again in 2024, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

In 2022, he paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer.

In March 2022, Kent endorsed remarks by Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) who had called Ukrainian President Volodymyr “a thug”.  He added, “We, the west at large, pushed (Russia) into this situation of encroachment”. 

“Zelenskyy was installed via a US backed color revolution, his goal is to move his county west so he virtue signals in woke ideology while using nazi battalions to crush his enemies,” Kent wrote on Twitter. “He was also smart enough to cut our elite in on the graft,” he said, while adding that Cawthorn “nailed it.”

At an April 2022 conservative political conference Kent claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin’s demands to take over the highly disputed Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine were “very reasonable.”

The Associated Press reported that during his Senate confirmation hearing for the Counterterrorism post, Kent refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents had somehow instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. “We’re looking into whether elements of the government could have enhanced the criminal acuity of some of the rioters that day,” Kent also endorsed  false claims that Trump won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden.

 “No one who…says government-controlled agents were part of the Jan. 6 attacks should be in charge of counterterrorism – period,” Democratic Majority for Israel executive director Mark Mellman said in a statement on Kent’s nomination to be Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Joe Kent is a zealot whose blind devotion to an extremist ideology concerns us deeply.” 

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the  the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also critical. “At a time when domestic violent extremism is one of the fastest-growing threats to the homeland, we are being asked to put someone in charge of counterterrorism who has aligned himself with political violence, promoted falsehoods that undermine our democracy, and tried to twist intelligence to serve a political agenda,” Warner said in a speech on the Senate floor.

As a side note, the appointment of Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center is only slightly more despicable than the August 2, 2025 confirmation of former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in a 50-45 vote along party lines. 

Jeannine Pirro (r) ( (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

“She has supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to exact vengeance on his political enemies and backed his challenges to federal judges who have questioned the legality of his immigration policies,” The New York Times reported. “And she was vocal in raising doubts about the legitimacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election to the presidency in 2020.”

And so it goes.