October 12: Viva Christoforo Columbo!

I live in a university community, where our woke city council has of course renamed October 12 in favor of the Native Americans whose genocide he supposedly launched. So our website celebrates this as Indigenous Peoples' Day. Not for me, thanks. In October 1957 I caught a flight from Frankfurt to Madrid, where I was astonished to find the Spanish capital all decked out in national and American flags. Columbus Day honors Spain, the Americas, and the Italian admiral who sailed between them. Long may it wave!

Down in Florida, two of my friends are shaking off the effects of Hurricane Isaias, and wondering if the US Weather Service was slipping Muslim names into its website. So I turned to my new best buddy, Claude, who reassured me. No, "Isaias" is actually of Hebrew descent, honoring a prophet whose name means "God is salvation."

Rather an odd monicker for a hurricane, I must say, though I'm glad to know it's not an early manifestation of Woke 3.0.

Read my earlier musings

Book of the month: The Cauldron

The Cauldron just went on sale, so I've only read the first hundred pages, but I have no doubt it'll be the Book of the Month and probably of the year. The oddly named and defiantly bald Simon Sebag Montefiore is a splendid writer and an admirable historian. He's writing here about the modern Middle East, which he defines as what I learned to call the Near East, plus the whole of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and all the way east to Afghanistan and Pakistan. As for "modern," that includes the 20th century and as much of the 21st as we've so far navigated. In other words: Israel vs Iran, the western democracies vs the Muslim theocracies, and a whole lot of other hatreds besides. Read about it in the Warbird's Book Club.

Ed Overend recalls his year with the AVG

When he came back to the US in the summer of 1942, it seems that Ed Overend worked for a while at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach or Santa Monica CA as a test pilot. While there, the company magazine interviewed him about his year with the AVG. Read it here.

And the useful idiots still celebrate Chinese communism

For more than thirty years now, I've had a Google search looking for references to the Flying Tigers, and hardly a month goes by that it doesn't pop up a mention of how the American Volunteer Group and their descendants love the China and the CCP. It's all bullfeathers, of course. For more, see the Annals of the Flying Tigers.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: