Meet someone worthy of as much awe, respect, admiration, and allegiance as it is possible for mere mortals to muster:  Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler. He was under fire 120 or so times, and won the Congressional Medal of Honor -- twice.

Butler also stepped in to save this nation, first-handed, and personally, from slipping into the cesspool of fascism at the hands of scheming, traitorous bankers and financiers who had plotted to overthrow the United States government and take over power in a coup.

The last unexplored frontier, along with space, is the junk drawer.  There may be six or seven here, but, it could be eight by now, the way these untrustworthy things self-replicate.

Some drawers have better tales to relay. Two showed up that were worth a recounting:  one involved lost jewelry worth millions; the other, priceless fossils collected by Darwin.  Some junk drawer.

Hereabouts, for some reason, it's all electrical tape, in dribs and drabs, spits and starts of it, on short-length, beat-up, battered old rolls.  Pens that don't work -- clicker or ink.  Some paperclips, a few pushpins, some thumbtacks, oddball and interesting bottlecaps, a couple of flaking "emergency-use-only" wine bottle corks.  A couple of pennies, some rubber bands -- elastics, if you please, if you're from, or on, the East Coast.

When diplomacy fails, there is always the leverage of war.  You can leverage yourself right into insanity.  You can lose your mind, lose your sight of the shore. Some have already been there. More will go still.

Waging war is about hazards, mostly to body, but just as surely of mind.  Some minds don't hold up well in jobs where signs of success are counting dead people, bodies heaped 'round. Uncomfortable yardsticks, echoes of home can intrude, "How many did you kill today, dear?"

Normally, some care is taken here, in this space, pushing around words, to not clobber anyone with personal pronouns, to not take out anyone with an assault on the "I"s.  This time, I am feeling assaulted, and I will say so, and do so, as me.

I thought I could let it all go streaming right past me, but turns out it's not so.  I am speaking now of the alleged acts of of child abuse  -- the latest ones we know about, anyway, on this planet, hip-deep in child-plucking ghouls -- in the Los Angeles area, in Miramonte.