My Cousin Elmo says, “I ate two popsicles yesterday and ended up with forty dollars in lumber.”

So ill was I that I thought I was going to die, but it did not prevent me from dreaming or, at the very least, hallucinating. The two I recall most emphatically involved God or a being I believe is God.

I have flown in my dreams for years, sometimes high, sometimes low to the ground. I then read someplace that flying dreams are associated with God-like desires.

Try as I might, I tried to fly from the sidewalk in front of our home. The best I could do was jump a foot off the ground and maybe a foot or two forward.

Disappointed and confused, I sat on the bench on our porch next to a man. I hadn’t seen him there before I took a seat.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked.

He looked at me, lifted his right pointed finger to his lips, and shushed me. I have not had a flying dream since.

The next is even odder.

The same being from the bench danced and twirled across my backyard, so I opened the door and shouted, “Hey, God, I command you you heal me!”

He appeared to ignore me, continuing across my yard. He then bid me be quiet, his pointer finger of his right hand to his lips, before touching the tip of a tree branch with the same finger, causing the entire tree to blossom tiny green leaves.

God shushed me — twice.

Hired to take photographs of a Venezuelan military review earlier this century and fresh out of adventures, I took the assignment.

As the parade moved down the open court, passing the cheering crowds, I had a surreal moment of being pulled back through time. It was like watching an old Movie Tone newsreel, and I felt flushed with trepidation.

With their naturally tan skin, brown eyes, and black hair, these soldiers, some on horseback, some in tanks and other equipment, were majority goose-stepping to the steady rhythm of drums and trumpeters. Their crisp gray uniforms, bright insignias, highly polished knee-high black boots, and the traditional helmet worn by German soldiers during World War II took me complete surprise.

It was back to Nuremberg, Germany, and the 1938 Reichsparteitag, but in full color.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Gas prices are going up faster than a Biden vote at 2 a.m.”

The same media that controlled the narrative of a pandemic is also using the same tactics to frighten us when it comes to Ukraine and Russia. Vladimir Putin is trying to halt a neo-Nazi movement ensconced in the Ukraine government while protecting the citizenry of two self-declared independent regions.

One sentence.

In 2008, Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgia breakaway regions. Russia provided them with financial support, offered Russian citizenship, and thwarted Georgia’s NATO aspirations by denying it control of its territory.

The same applies to Ukraine.

The Donbas region of eastern Ukraine contains two provinces, Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR,) bordering Russia. Citizens from these two areas declared independence right after the 2014 Ukraine revolution.

However, Ukraine has used military and paramilitary forces to regain control of the regions, killing about 14,000 people and displacing millions of residents. Russia has since prevented Ukraine from liquidating these regions, from joining NATO or the European Union.

The US media are not reporting that:

The United States backed the violent coup in Ukraine in 2014 to justify a new NATO military mobilization against Russia. Obama administration spokespeople announced that the administration had financed and orchestrated the organizations participating in the demonstrations on the public square, the Maidan.

President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland visited rioters several times, refusing to acknowledge that in addition to peaceful demonstrators, there were openly neo-fascist gangs conducting an armed insurrection against the elected government. Nuland was also caught by wiretap instructing the US Ambassador to Ukraine who the new Prime Minister would be.

Referring to Parliament members Vitali Klitschko as “Klitsch” and Arseniy Yatsenuk as “Yats,” she stated, “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think Yats is the guy .”

Government military forces and neo-Nazi militias carried out perpetual warfare against the Donbass region of the country, which refused to submit to the illegal coup. Western media, meanwhile, continues to claim Russia caused the problem by objecting to the Kiev government, annexing Crimea, and invading the Donbass.

The coup d’état against President Victor Yanukovych succeeded on Feb. 22, 2014. His life in peril from commandoes of the so-called Maidan Self-Defense Forces, Yanukovych fled, ultimately seeking asylum in Russia.

The 2014 coup followed the example of the 2004 Orange Revolution, where maidan rioters claimed Yanukovych’s first election was fraudulent. In December 2004, they forced a revote, which Yanukovych lost.

Yanukovych ran again in 2010 and won.

However, his November 2013 decision to delay signing with the European Union became the pretext for a full-scale coup. Rioters moved into Kiev, saying they would not leave until Yanukovych left office.

As a side-note…

The color revolution method, as in Orange Revolution, is simple. “Color” refers to how a single color, symbol, slogan, or demand, promoted and repeated often enough, can inflame passion and retard reason. In its latest application, a color revolution operation was conducted in an attempted coup against the US manifesting in mob-think, mob-defiance, and mob-violence, funded by operations connected to Soros.

More than two thousand non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine, funded by the US, the UK, the EU, and Soros’ Open Society projects, continued to shape public opinion. Meanwhile, Nuland boasted that $5 billion had gone into Ukraine through State Department channels in the form of grants to develop an intellectual community of experts, oriented against the Russian Federation and directed toward shaping Russophobic attitudes in Ukrainian society.

Nuland addressed a Washington D.C. National Press Club event, stating, “Since the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the United States supported the Ukrainians in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government. We have invested more than $5 billion to help Ukraine achieve these and other goals.”

While many people came to the Maidan waving EU flags, the paramilitary groups marched under the red and black flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the mid-20th-century fascist movement of Stepan Bandera. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and carried out the ethnic-cleansing mass murder of Poles and Jews on its own, as well.

These neo-Nazi groups called themselves Right Sector; their formation and build-up from 1991 to 2013 came directly out of funding to Bandera’s followers by MI6 and the Allen Dulles wing of the American CIA during the Cold War.

Crimea seceded from Ukraine in March 2014, voting to join the Russian Federation. In the Donbass, the Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and Lugansk Peoples Republic (LPR) declared their independence, leading to 14 thousand killed by Ukraine army units and the Right Sector battalions.

Negotiations held in the capital of Belarus and conducted by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, reached the Minsk II agreement between Kiev and the Donbass republics for a ceasefire and prospective political settlement in that region in February 2015. Controversy remains over the Minsk II commitment to Constitutional changes in Ukraine and autonomy for the DPR and LPR.

The radical nationalists in the Ukrainian Parliament, with Right Sector figures among them, have refused to revise the Constitution as Ukrainian forces staged a creeping offensive to regain control over the Donbass region.

Alexander Hug, deputy chief of The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe-Special Monitoring Mission for Ukraine, reported that forces in Kiev had positioned large-caliber artillery, including howitzers, tanks, and rocket systems banned under Minsk II in the open with impunity.

Senators John McCain, Lindsey Grahan, and Amy Klobuchar spent New Year’s Eve with Kiev troops near the front line with the DPR. McCain issued a letter to Trump, ignoring Hug’s report, blaming the Donbass escalation on Russia, demanding the US supply Kiev with “defensive lethal assistance” weapons.

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko then announced his intention to hold a referendum on joining NATO. Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman visited NATO Headquarters in Brussels to meet with NATO Deputy Secretary-General Rose Gottemoeller, formerly an undersecretary of state in the Obama Administration.

The media ignore this, focusing instead on Trump handing Ukraine over to Russia, as when Eurasia Daily Monitor analyst Pavel Felgenhauer complained, “If Trump hands over Ukraine, he will make Russia great again.”

Among the most aggressive in the maidan operations was the Right Sector, founded in November 2013 as a paramilitary confederation. Made of three groups, including the Tryzub or Stepan Bandera Trident, founded in 1993 by successors to the Hitler-aligned 1941 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN(b), named for Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Hitlerite, who founded this organization in Munich during WW II.

“The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian people to free itself from Muscovite occupation,” states the OUN(b) 1941 proclamation.

National-Socialist is a Nazi.

In 1943, the military unit set up by Bandera’s OUN(b) carried out a mass extermination campaign against Poles and Jews in Ukraine, killing an estimated 70,000 civilians during the Summer of that year alone. By April 1948, Bandera was working for British intelligence, whose 1956 MI6 report described him as “a professional underground worker with a terrorist background and ruthless notions about rules of the game.”

In 1948, Bandera’s top lieutenant Mykola Lebed, who carried out the Ukraine exterminations, went to work for the CIA, heading the front company, Prolog Research Corp., controlled during the 1950s by CIA Director of Plans Frank Wisner. US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) tried to stop Lebed from entering the US, but CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles secured permission for him to come and go at will.

The other two constituent groups of the Right Sector were the Ukrainian Patriot (UP), and the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).

Founded in 1991 as the neo-Nazi youth wing of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, UP became the Svoboda (Freedom) Party, whose leaders were committed to Bandera in 2004. UP members were known for their paramilitary training and deployed to the Maidan in December 2013.

Likewise, the UNA-UNSO and its youth arm, Bily Molot (White Hammer), founded in 1991, entered the Right Sector in November 2013. Members occupied positions in the post-coup government, while their neo-Nazi organizations, like the Azov Battalion, were absorbed into the military and bureaucracy.

As a young Ukrainian emigré in London in 1984, U.S.-based backer of the coup, Natalia Diuk had very close contacts with Prolog Research, whose 2008 poster glorifies the Nazi 14th Waffen SS Division. She married Adrian Karatnycky, also of Prolog headed Freedom House, and took part at the Atlantic Council.

Dmytro Yarosh became the leader in 2007 of the Stepan Bandera Trident, then head of the Right Sector in November 2013. In July 2013, he called for a national revolution in Ukraine and an end to the “Russian Empire.”

Andriy Parubiy founded the Ukrainian Patriot (UP) youth group in 1991, which became a Right Sector unit in November 2013. He was Commandant of the Maidan. Following the coup, he became Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council and later Chairman of the Ukraine Parliament.

Yuriy Lutsenko was the founder of TUR (Third Ukrainian Republic,) which cited the earlier two republics as, first, that of 1917, and second, the 1941 Hitlerite Bandera Stetsko Ukrainian State. In 2017, Lutsenko was the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.

Yaroslav Stetsko was Bandera’s deputy and the declared head of the 1941 state; his widow Slava Stetsko continued his work.

Oleksandr Turchynov, a parliamentarian for the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party, was Speaker of the Rada and was unconstitutionally installed as Acting President on Feb. 26, 2014, by a coalition of the Svoboda and Fatherland parties. Turchynov was Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk, a parliamentarian for the Batkivshchyna Party, was unconstitutionally installed on Feb. 26, 2014, as Prime Minister by the Batkivshchyna/Svoboda coalition. He held the position until April 2016.

Vitali Klitschko was a parliamentarian for the Udar Party (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms,) a boxing champion, and Mayor of Kiev.

Oleh Tyanybok was a parliamentarian for the Svoboda Party.
He was Chairman of the Ukraine Parliament.

Holos Ameryky, security chief for Bandera, co-edited the Prolog-associated Soviet National Survey. She joined the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1990 as Vice President for Africa, Central Europe, and Eurasia.

Victoria Nuland was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 when dismissed by the Trump Administration. Nuland was the lead liaison for the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

She was also a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2005 and Ambassador to NATO from 2000 to 2003, advocating out-of-area deployments and similar operations.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, is the co-founder of Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which included targetting Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen to destabilize Russia, India, and China.

Nuland’s Jan. 15, 2014 assertion that the coup was a spontaneous democratic upsurge, “[T]he movement that started as a demand for a European future grew into a protest for basic human dignity and justice, clean and accountable government and economic and political independence of Ukraine,” is disproven.

It is the same story as a YouTube video causing a spontaneous attack on a US embassy, leaving four Americans dead. US media outlets pushed that claim till it was proven false.

We are being lied to again, but few are catching on this time.

It is not every day that the swing-shift announcer gets asked to be the Grand Marshal for Independence Day. So I jumped at the offer.

It was early Friday evening, and I went to find my contact. That person turned out to be a rather wonderful-looking and wonderfully built rancher woman.

She showed me where I would be bunking for the night. It was a ranch house with several empty bedrooms and a large spread of food laid out on the table.

Up the street from the ranch house were the rodeo grounds where cowboys and women were in the finishing stages of a rodeo. I sat on the fence and watched, hoping someone would offer me a bronc to brace, but alas…no.

As night slipped over us, out came that weekend’s main attraction, the Ragin’ Cajun Doug Kershaw. We spent the night dancing around the hardpan arena and drinking beer.

My contact hardly let me out of her sight as we heel-toed to every tune that Louisiana fiddler knew and then some.

After midnight, I headed back to the ranch house. The food was gone, and so was the beer, so I retired to my room and climbed into bed.

Laying there, listening to the music, I heard a noise from the kitchen. I pulled on my jeans and tee-shirt and stepped out to see my hostess doing the dishes.

I helped her.

Once done, I left her to put away the dishes and returned to bed. Soon I heard her knock at my door, which she opened and poked her head inside.

“May I come in?”

“Sure.”

She didn’t turn on the light, which I thought was strange until I realized she was removing her clothes. We took our time making a mess of the bed linens.

Nearly dawn, she rolled from the bed and got dressed. Slipping into her boots, she leaned over me and kissed me deeply.

“Gotta go, my husband’s probably wondering where I am.”

After about two-and-a-half hours of sleep for me, I got up, cleaned my face in the bathroom down the hall, and finished dressing.

Coffee was already on, and I had a cup. As I stood on the porch hoping to see my hostess and learn where I was to be for the start of the day’s parade.

Then a guy came up on the porch, “There’s a change in plans. Doug Kershaw going to be our Grand Marshal. So we don’t need you now.”

Many people, including, and most especially including Program Directors, do not know how often we overnight jocks get a call from a celebrity appearing in town. It happened to me many times, and sometimes they were very memorable.

One such was the Sunday morning ring-up I got from Richard Colangelo, a comedian appearing at Sammy’s Showroom inside Harrah’s Reno or one of those places. That call led us to ride around that day, me telling him about Northern Nevada and him telling me off-color jokes.

He comes to mind as he took his life on Sat., Mar. 10, 2007. I think I still have his private number in an old inoperable cellphone, hidden away in one of my many junk drawers.

We knew Richard Colangelo by his stage name, Richard Jenni.

It was midsummer, and I’d been at the radio station for about five months. It was the first station to hire me since my moving to Nevada, and I was happy to be doing the graveyard shift on the weekends.

That evening, I decided to wear my Birkenstocks, an old pair of OD green jungle pants from my military days, a white knee-length shirt (otherwise known as a nightshirt,) and a black six-button vest that I left open to work. It was not my usual jeans, white tee-shirt, and tennis shoes or boots.

My coworker and friend Kathy McCovey looked me up and down, then said, “What in the hell are you wearing?”

I smiled and shrugged, “So, I felt a little Bohemian.”

As a child, should I stand outside my front door on Redwood Drive, I could see to my right the Philips’, the Salsbury’s, most prominently, Mrs. Keatings, and further in the distance, the Myers home, though it partly blocked by a small hill. The hill, at one time, had been a simple mound of dirt and one of three, left to nature, and because of that, wheat grasses had grown over it till it looked like the rest of the field.

If I were to stand at the end of my driveway, I would see the Babbs’ home, the Morgan’s, the Methodist house, because it was for the minister family to live in, followed by the Champion’s and the Peterson’s. Not in view would be Mrs. Van Vanten’s home, Judge Hopper’s, or the Walcott’s, and hidden by Mrs. Keating’s home was Wright’s house.

Such was the layout of homes in my neighborhood.

One afternoon I came home to find the field, with its hills, trees, and the bluff, a three-foot drop off where previous excavation had left off, razed. Gone too was the late 1950s model Coca-Cola machine with no doors, but filled with rainwater and home to tadpoles and Polly-wogs and frogs.

At first, it was upsetting, but then I learned it came following a burglary of Mrs. Keatings. The perpetrators, whoever they were, had used the nearby copse of pine trees to hide, leaving behind expensive Native American artifacts.

It was Don Bennett who cleared the field. With Mr. Bennett’s passing on Fri., Dec. 3, 2021, only Bonnie Peterson, Carolyn Seats, John Van Dusen, and 91-year-old John Arnold, that I can think of, remain.

Years ago, one evening, a reporter raced out of his house to find his car would not start. He called a cab.

What was so important? A house fire on the fire/police scanner.

Paying the cab driver, he got out and went to work. Fire crews made short work of the structure blaze and returned to their station.

Suddenly, he found himself alone, miles from home, and since cellphones were not available, he had to walk the four or five miles back into town. Such is the life of anyone who works in the rural newspaper business.

After missing our publishing deadline, I knew I’d have to deliver the newspapers once printed. No problem, since that is part of my job.

It happens that on that day, my truck had broken down and was in the shop. Further, my wife’s car went crazy and all sorts of sensor lights popped on along her dash.

So, taking a cue from the reporter, I called for an Uber ride to help me get my delivery out. It’s the first time I used the service ever.

It cost over $200 to complete my deliveries, the price of doing business. As I finished, the repair shop called to tell me my truck was ready, so add nearly $400 to my spending for the day.

But it didn’t break the bank — I still have 56 cents to my name, so I’m ahead.