BatesLine op-ed headlines

True history of the two million acres opened for settlement in the April 22, 1889, Land Run. No, the land wasn't stolen. American taxpayers paid millions for it, twice.

An essay from 2012. If you want to understand why the people who call the shots don't get much public criticism, you need to know about the people I call the yacht guests. "They staff the non-profits and the quangos, they run small service-oriented businesses that cater to the yacht owners, they're professionals who have the yacht owners as clients, they work as managers for the yacht owners' businesses. They may not be wealthy, but they're comfortable, and they have access to opportunities and perks that are out of financial reach for the folks who aren't on the yacht. Their main job is not to rock the boat, but from time to time, they're called upon to defend the yacht and its owners against perceived threats."

Introducing Tulsa's Complacent City Council

From 2011: "One of the things that seemed to annoy City Hall bureaucrats about the old council was their habit of raising new issues to be discussed, explored, and acted upon. From the bureaucrats' perspective, this meant more work and their own priorities displaced by the councilors' pet issues.... [The new councilors are] content to be spoon-fed information from the mayor, the department heads, and the members and staffers of authorities, boards, and commissions. The Complacent Councilors won't seek out alternative perspectives, and they'll be inclined to dismiss any alternative points of view that are brought to them by citizens, because those citizens aren't 'experts.' They'll vote the 'right' way every time, and the department heads, authority members, and mayoral assistants won't have to answer any questions that make them uncomfortable."

BatesLine has presented over a dozen stories on the history of Tulsa's Greenwood district, focusing on the overlooked history of the African-American city-within-a-city from its rebuilding following the 1921 massacre, the peak years of the '40s and '50s, and its second destruction by government through "urban renewal" and expressway construction. The linked article provides an overview, my 2009 Ignite Tulsa talk, and links to more detailed articles, photos, films, and resources.

From 2015: "Having purged the cultural institutions and used them to brainwash those members of the public not firmly grounded in the truth, the Left is now purging the general public. You can believe the truth, but you have to behave as if the Left's delusions are true.

"Since the Left is finally being honest about the reality that some ethical viewpoint will control society, conservatives should not be shy about working to recapture the culture for the worldview and values that built a peaceful and prosperous civilization, while working to displace from positions of cultural influence the advocates of destructive doctrines that have led to an explosion of relational breakdown, mental illness, and violence."

NEW RELEASE (August 2024): BACK HOME AGAIN: A WESTERN SWING REUNION - Origin Jazz Library

"A 2-CD deluxe package documenting a musical reunion of three generations of pioneering western swing musicians. Never before released, this set marks the coda in the lives of legendary greats from the Dallas/Fort Worth area, recorded in 1983 and 1984. Produced by Cary Ginell." From Ginell's Facebook post about the album: "The Dal-Jam Reunion Band includes [Smokey] Montgomery, Zeke Campbell, and Johnny Strawn (Light Crust Doughboys), Jim Boyd and Carroll Hubbard (Bill Boyd & his Cowboy Ramblers), Fred "Papa" Calhoun and Ocie Stockard (Milton Brown & his Musical Brownies), Leon Rausch and Joe Frank Ferguson (Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys), Freddy Casares (the Wanderers), Roscoe Pierce (the Sunshine Boys), Tommy Camfield (Hank Thompson), Milton Brown's surviving brother, Roy Lee Brown, J. Eldon ("June") Whalin, the only surviving original member of Bob Wills' first band in Waco, Texas, plus 13 others." Origin Jazz Library has also issued a series of early western swing on CD.

Revealed after 26 years, judge was source of scoop for the ages

John Amick, the district judge who sealed the 1993 multicounty grand jury felony indictment of Gov. David Walters and later received his misdemeanor guilty plea, leaked the indictment to the press. "He had seen the governor's indictment, signed an arrest warrant and set bail at $16,500. Then, at the request of prosecutors, he sealed the indictment from the public while the investigation continued. What was bothering the amiable judge that September in 1993, he explained later, was what he witnessed by chance shortly afterward. At an event, he saw a sweet older lady make a donation to Walters' reelection effort. He thought to himself she wouldn't have done that if she knew the governor was under indictment, he explained. So, the judge told the secret to the state's largest newspaper, then known as The Daily Oklahoman."

U.S. Congressional District Shapefiles

Shapefiles of historical congressional district boundaries for the 1st through the 114th Congresses (1789-2015)

Mojave Desert ghost town Amboy fights to survive on Route 66 - Los Angeles Times

"AMBOY, Calif. -- It's a Friday afternoon in mid-May and a Czech biker is eating an ice cream cone at the counter of a gas station along a desolate stretch of the Mojave Desert. Outside, his entourage crowds around a towering Atomic Age sign for a group photo before speeding away along Route 66.

"A British couple sip hot tea, though the mercury is pushing 100 degrees. A young woman in a crop top sits cross-legged in the middle of the street while a man films her, seemingly oblivious to the traffic whizzing by. On some days, small planes land on the dirt airstrip so their occupants can grab a root beer float or chili dog.

"'It's in the middle of nowhere in the desert, but you see a multitude of different types of people in Amboy,' said Kyle Okura, 31, who owns Roy's gas station, along with the rest of the ghost town, after inheriting it from his father last year. 'That's what's so amazing. You hear stories from all different parts of the world.'"

What happened to Google?! Google AI being hilariously awful

Fran, a blogger from Reading, England, writes: "The people in charge of the Google Search Engine have decided to prioritise Google-owned websites (Reddit, Youtube, Quora etc) over any others when deciding what it will show you in answer to a search query. Loads of bloggers and website owners, who previously made a living providing informative and useful content on the internet... have found their traffic absolutely destroyed overnight by the latest updates.... [Google] is now pushing AI answers to people on its search engine, rather than directing them to the websites of people who have created the content it has used to train its AI bots, or whose content has been stolen wholesale and parroted out by the Google AI Bots.... With AI content giving people an instant answer to their query right there on the Google homepage there is now zero motivation from people to go any further and visit any other website." Bottom line: Use an alternative to Google search and ignore any AI replies that your search provider offers. Reward real content providers with visits to their websites.

RELATED: Fran writes about how she and other bloggers make money from their blogs. Note that most of these work for influencer blogs about things like parenting and homemaking, but not for hyperlocal blogs like BatesLine. I used to have managed blog ads (from BlogAds), but that's been over 10 years ago since that vanished. I've never wanted to have Google ads on my site. I've gotten offers for paid posts and link insertions, but that's not for me.

Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory - for religion in public life -- Daily Telegraph

Fraser Nelson on the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party:

"It's not just that she was born into the Free Church of Scotland: she converted into it, leaving the more liberal Presbyterian church. She disagrees with gay marriage, sex outside of marriage and even women ministers. She'd uphold everyone's rights, she says - but her faith is real. And far more important to her than politics....

"A Cambridge graduate, appointed Nicola Sturgeon's finance minister at the age of 29, Forbes has long stood out. Brought up in India to missionary parents, she first followed the normal pattern of dodging questions about her faith.

"Three years ago, she changed tack. 'To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ,' she told an astonished Nick Robinson. 'I believe that he died for me, he saved me. And that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.'"

Weird history: Heavener Runestone may prove Vikings were in Oklahoma 1000 years ago | KFOR.com Oklahoma City

"'If the tales told by the old-timers are correct, Oklahoma may once have contained dozens of runestones. Five of these have been found,' Farley wrote on her website not long after the internet became widely available in America. 'The study of epigraphy, which has dominated my adult life, was to have as its seed a childhood visit to a local site... it would take thirty-five years of research to determine that the Heavener Runestone on Poteau Mountain in eastern Oklahoma is most likely a boundary marker.'"

Fort Gibson: A Brief History, by Grant and Carolyn Thomas Foreman

Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, marked its bicentennial last month.

"It was on the twenty-first day of April 1824, that two long flatboats were to be seen ascending Grand River, manned by bearded young men in the uniform of the United States Army. As they worked the boats up the river they scanned the shore for a landing place, and about three miles from the river's mouth they were successful in discovering a wide ledge of shelving rock on the east bank, which made a natural boat landing. They tied up their boats at this ledge, and unloaded axes, adzes, froes, saws, food supplies, tents, baggage, and a miscellaneous assortment of camp equipment. On the bank they met other uniformed young men, unshaved and long of hair, who had come by land to the place from 5 Fort Smith with their horses and oxen. They were, in all, 122 officers and privates of companies B, C, G, and K of the Seventh Infantry.

"The river bottom land near their landing place was low and fertile, and covered by an immense canebrake, great forest trees, and a jungle of vines and undergrowth. The soldiers were soon engaged in clearing sufficient space in which to set up their tents. Then began the weeks and months of labor necessary to remove the cane, vines, and brambles from an area large enough for an army post; the ring of the ax and the crash of the huge falling trees were heard, and roaring fires consumed the prodigality of nature. Logs were fashioned by axes and cross-cut saws into lengths and shapes suitable to form the walls of houses; other logs were split into puncheons for floors, or rived into clapboards to roof the structures to be built."

Digital Equipment Corp. RL-02 disk drive

In February 1989, I flew to the UK for the first time, bringing with me a disk cartridge the size of a large deep-dish pizza (15" diameter, 2.25" height) with a capacity of 10MB. It had to fly as a checked bag in a shipping box. The cartridge, an RL-02K, would fit into a DEC RL-02 disk drive connected to a PDP-11/70, and it contained the software to manage a DR-11W interface to a VMEbus chassis, which provided the ARINC 429 interface to communicate with a Flight Management System being added to a British Airways Boeing 737 Ground Maintenance Simulator at the airline's Viscount House training center.

Bitsavers has tons of documentation on the RL-01/RL-02 drives. The wealth of detailed drawings and protocol documentation (the sort of thing that modern manufacturers don't release any more) enabled Christopher Parish to convert an RL-02 into the world's largest thumb drive, as he explains in a Hackaday video. Parish designed a controller card using an FPGA to interface to the drive and expose the data as a USB mass storage device. He can connect it to modern OSes but also to emulators running DEC's RT-11 OS.

The Christian Canary Dying in the Coal Mine That Is India - The Stream

"Secret No. 2: a significant portion of North-East India is predominantly Christian. The mostly mountainous region of eight states and over 200 tribes experienced an unprecedented explosion of Christianity in the early part of the 20th century.

"Missiologists and anthropologists agree that the Gospel has been the "single most important catalyst" revolutionizing the North-East tribals in every area, from literacy to the emancipation of women.

"Most remarkably, even though it was Western missionaries who brought Christianity to the tribes, the churches of North-East India are fiercely independent and proudly indigenous, blending their own treasured heritage with the import of Western music and culture.

"Throw a stone in Nagaland, Mizoram or Meghalaya and it will hit a quartet of Christians singing hymns in four-part harmony."