I knew that my also-self-imposed pledge to keep silent during the campaign would not hold if I continued posting, so I sequestered myself from the blog for the duration.

It’s over.

I’m back.

After twenty years of escorting gullible thrill seekers to Gardner Island in the Pacific, the “IGHAR” organization has yet again come away from their fantasy island empty handed.

After making monumental fools of themselves back in May and June with their usual brand of self-serving hyperbole and claims of “evidence” of finding Amelia Earhart, “TIGHAR” as it pompously calls itself, has begun their voyage of shame back to the U.S., and, also in their now predictable pattern, they are saying little about their colossal failure, as they begin the months of preparations for what one could be forgiven for predicting will be yet another issuance of claims of “evidence” followed by the announcement of, yes, another fantasy expedition to “Nikkumororo” after bulking up on financial contributions.

In late spring, as they began breathlessly hyping their latest exploit to the news media, the IGHAR posted a plea on their website for more money, promising, this time, to really, really, really, really bring home the definitive evidence that Amelia Earhart landed and died on “Nikkumororo,” leaving her Lockheed Electra lying upside down with its landing gear sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon in plain sight of any of the scores of people who have lived on or visited Gardner in the last seventy-five years to see. (There were, of course, no reports).

In the highly unlikely event that any of my readers have been on a truly deserted island or for some other reason not read a newspaper or watched a television news program in the last twenty years, I will spell it out for you in plain, if rather exaggerated bold-faced type for emphasis:

AMELIA EARHART DID NOT LAND ON OR ANYWHERE NEAR, BY A FACTOR OF HUNDREDS OF MILES, GARDNER ISLAND. THERE IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN ANY EVIDENCE THAT WOULD CAUSE A REASONABLE PERSON TO BELIEVE THAT AMELIA EARHART AND HER NAVIGATOR FREDERICK NOONAN ALIGHTED ON GARDNER ISLAND, OR ANYWHERE WITHIN HUNDREDS OF MILES OF THAT LOCATION.

More on what actually happened to Amelia Earhart may or not be posted here later, but one thing is certain, she didn’t land on Gardner Island or anywhere else in the Phoenix Islands. Period. That should be the end of it.

As it stands, we will likely have more than a dozen new titles in the list, with a range of topics from history and religion to westerns and hard-boiled pulp. It is an exciting time to be starting a new publishing enterprise.

I would  invite–and challenge–all professional writers and news reporters to do a little research on the history of the “TIGHAR” organization before publishing their press releases as news.

Since the 1990s, this organization has repeatedly made claims of having discovered “evidence” of Amelia Earhart having crashed at their preferred expedition site, Gardner Island (“Nikumororo”). Again and again, they have conducted these commercial expeditions and every time, they have brought back some form of “evidence” of Amelia Earhart having been there.

This “evidence” is merely a repetition of a very old pattern of bogus findings and is not a “clue” in the Amelia Earhart story. This is but the latest in a twenty-year series of specious and misleading statements issued by this organization, “TIGHAR”, designed to garner attention to itself and to promote its for-profit fantasy-expedition “research” into the Amelia Earhart story.

The entire Phoenix Islands area was thoroughly searched at the time of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, in July, 1937. Since then, here was a British colonial settlement (the last) on the island throughout much of the mid-twentieth century, as well as U.S. military installations built there and staffed during and after WWII, with scores of people living there and visitng in the intervening years. Any evidence of Amelia Earhart’s having ever been there would have been discovered decades ago.

Last month, the “TIGHAR” organization issued a press release, stating that they had discovered a photograph purporting to show the landing gear of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon. The idea of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra landing gear protruding out of the surface of the lagoon at low tide and not being seen at some point in the last 75 years is patently absurd.

Analyses of radio direction-finder and aeronautical navigation data, along with official documents and the testimony of credible witnesses, have conclusively shown that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in the Marshall Islands group and never closer than a thousand miles from Gardner Island.

The “TIGHAR” organization has fixated on Gardner (aka “Nikumaroro”) Island, because it suits their profit-making tour business, which escorts its customers on paid expeditions every year or so, and has for many years. A simple check of the press history of the organization will reveal many instances of so-called “discoveries” of “evidence” (airplane parts, bottles, shoes, etc.) from this same location, all of which have been swiftly debunked by actual bona fide historical experts, not “experts” associated with this commercial, for-profit company.

This latest publicity-seeking exploit, which also involves a ploy to co-opt the U.S. State Department into lending its imprimatur to the group’s business activities–will die down quickly, and, in all likelihood, will re-surface in a few months with new “evidence” to compel adventurers to pay handsomely for the TIGHAR “historians” to escort them on another two-week expedition to the Central Pacific.

In a piece “Does the Supreme Court Believe in Double Jeopardy Protections?” published on his Atlantic.com blog, Andrew Cohen cites this case as a key indicator of the Court’s turn away from the established doctrine of not subjecting defendants to multiple trials for the same accusation.

Aside from the question of why the Court heard the case in the first place, which I’ll admit does seem a bit strange, given the elements of the case, there appears to be little in the way of precedent-establishing new law created here.

The reason is simple: There was no verdict. No verdict and no acquittal. 

In Blueford, the trial court was given the murder case with the usual jury instructions, but after retiring and deliberating for “a few hours” it returned and claimed it was “hopelessly deadlocked.” The jury foreperson then entered into a colloquy with the judge over the counts the jury considered and the resultant vote counts.

In the first vote, the jury unanimously agree against a capital murder verdict, and against a first degree murder verdict, but could not reach agreement on the question of manslaughter, and did not vote on returning a verdict of negligent homicide. No verdict was entered into the record and, after issuing an Allen charge, the judge sent the jury back out to continue to deliberate. After a brief period, they returned without having reached a verdict and the judge declared a mistrial.

In its 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, affirmed a lower court ruling that the State of Arkansas was not barred from re-trying Blueford under the Double Jeopardy standard, because in order for double jeopardy to adhere in the prosecution, a verdict must be reached, delivered to and affirmed by the judge.

The presiding judge’s exchange with the jury foreperson might be misconstrued as a verdict, but Chief Justice Roberts and the Court’s majority agreed that it did not constitute the rendering of a verdict, and the trial judge’s act of instructing the jury to resume deliberations (whereupon they could have re-opened discussion on any of the potential charges) was enough to determine that the jury’s deliberations did not result in a verdict, and the state of Arkansas is free to refile against Blueford. 

English and Dutch adventurers came to America in 1620 to escape England and the Netherlands, which of course did then and still do have a monarchs. As colonists, the settlers still pledged fealty to “our Lord King James” whose name was used as often as not in the same sentence as God, but later they got tired of the King’s soldiers, whom he sent over here as proxies to lord it over the colonists–the very thing they left the old part of the world to escape!

So by the time of the American Revolution in 1776, they’d had it with the whole “dread Sovereign” imperial monarchy thing.

They made sure, beginning in 1787, when the Constitution of the United States of America was formulated, and later on, in 1789, when the First Congress passed the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that freedom and the rule of law governed the people of America, so they were no longer subject to the whim of a monarch.

Everything worked out well for quite awhile.

Then the condition and quality of the U.S. government began to erode in the early part of the Twentieth Century. It got worse after World War II. By the end of the 1980s, the government had become what it is now: unresponsive to the will of its citizens; out-of-touch with the people; profligate; non-representative.

By far the most corrosive influence in American politics and government is money. As long as it is legal to bribe politicians and officeholders, you shouldn’t expect good, representative government. This is precisely why there is gridlock and increasing polarity of thought and action in Washington DC, and why our state legislatures are so appallingly bad.

Ironically, America has reached the point where only a monarch, a King unsullied by the taint of bribery and influence, could straighten things out.

The book If I Were King is a fanciful, sometimes comic and sometimes serious look at what I would do, acting completely autonomously, unilaterally and arbitrarily as sovereign, completely aloof from any pecuniary influence or conflict of interest whatsoever, to make America and the world a better place.

\ˈzhän-rə,ˈzhäⁿ-;ˈzhäⁿr;ˈjän-rə\
noun

• 1 : a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content
• 2 : kind, sort

Why create a new fiction genre? Good question.

The answer: To blur–and eventually do away with–artificial distinctions. And really, to defy the categorization of storytelling, in order to produce the best, most enjoyable and memorable stories imaginable.

Fiction genre distinctions are antiquated–a rubric of a bygone era.

Writing in the “Critic At Large” column of The New Yorker this week, Arthur Krystal underscores this point by analyzing the provenance of category distinctions in literature, and quoting bespoke authors skewering the practice.

Today the literary climate has changed: the canon has been impeached, formerly neglected writers have been saluted, and the presumed superiority of one type of book over another no longer passes unquestioned.

In that same article, Ursula K. Le Guin makes the essential point: “The distinction [...] between literary and genre fiction, though cherished by many critics and teachers, was never very useful and is by now worse than useless.” Worse than useless.

Pigeon-holing stories into genres started at the dawn of commercial publishing time, when editors and publishers, along with their marketing and sales people, felt the need to be able to quickly categorize a book, and as this practice evolved, its author. It is an anachronism, one that is worse than useless. A device to facilitate literary snobbery on the one hand, on the other, an inviolable shibboleth of academia.

Now that we are no longer hidebound by artificial distinctions and their associated stigma, it is time to return to the ancient tradition of storytelling for its own sake.

In the black sand, Clay saw the glint of yellow that had sent men across continents, over into barren deserts and over mountains in below-zero temperatures. Gold–the element had caused many a struggle to the death, but in that flash of gold against the ebony sands in his pan, Clay saw a way out of his struggle to save Idlewilde Hall, and a way to save the town.

If you are concerned about American politics and the validity of our election process, or how failing to ensure the honesty of elections can lead to long-term consequences, you should read this book.