Okefenokee Joe, an 11-and-a-half-foot alligator who is believed to have lived in a Georgia swamp since World War II, has died, officials said.
The alligator passed away from old age, the Georgia’s Coastal Ecology Lab said, and had been part of a satellite tag program. The lab had been observing his movements in the Okefenokee Swamp since June 2020, according to a statement on Facebook.
The celebrated alligator’s exact age was unknown, but he “was a very old alligator as he had scar tissue over both eyes and his scutes were worn almost smooth,” the lab said. “Alligators can live to be approximately 80 years old though so it is possible he was close to that!”
Joe was last tracked via GPS on July 20, and the lab said, “We first thought the tag had simply fallen off as it had been several weeks since we had received any GPS points from him.”
But after several weeks, the satellite tag was found and the lab confirmed his death.
“We are so grateful to have known him, for his contribution to science and the further understanding and preservation of his species,” they said.
Joe weighed in at more than 400 pounds and would have been considered a “dominant male in his day,” the lab shared in a Facebook post last year.
Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965. photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.
Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cyprus. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.
Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”
The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.
The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.
For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.
Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.
In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.
On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right. photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.
Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.
A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.
Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.
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2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually.
IMHO, the essence of the Louis’ Lunch burger is easily achieved. You don’t need the 1890s vertical broiler. Just serve your medium rare burger with tomato on buttered toast.
LithHub specializes in publishing and linking striking examples of exactly what’s wrong with contemporary pseudo-intellectual culture.
Yesterday’s email compendium prominently featured a book excerpt in which the above female person of color, reacts to having received a generously-funded writing residency at a posh country estate.
Ms. Busby clearly operates on the basis of a sense of artistic grandeur and identity group entitlement that upon encountering the patron/artist relationship causes her to react to her benefactors a lot differently from the way artists like Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Bach did in the dear dead days of yore.
Busby does not sing her benefactors’ praises or dedicate a grand work to them. No, la Busby instead composes a carefully crafted personal response consisting of a full-throated outpouring of envy, snark, and contempt for her white liberal benefactors.
Previous classical literary representatives of underclass malice, envy, ingratitude, and insolence, Thersites, Caliban, Uriah Heep, never even came close to her.
That night, we are all welcomed to the coast by a man from the arts foundation. He smiles when he talks, apologizes for things that don’t matter. We offer back to him things he gave us in the first place—a seat, a plate of the catered food, a bottle of water. He says he just wants to get out of there and leave us to it, whatever it is, but he’ll see us on Saturday for the community Q&A.
“The people who live here are so happy to have you, and they’re very excited to hear all about your art,” he says.
Jill, we can’t wait to hear all about how our racism influences your art.
If you make us feel guilty enough, we’ll call you brave for your efforts.
You can’t make us love blackness, but you can make us love the way you use it.
How will you use it?
On the walls are childhood photos of the homeowner’s now-adult children. They spent their summers here, their growth spurts recorded on the door frame in permanent marker, meant to stay.
After he leaves, we convene in the yellow house for dinner. We sit around the dining room table with the curtains wide open on a window that belongs to them but is temporarily full of us instead: the screenwriter, the painter, the muralist, the illustrator, the actress, the performance artist, the mixed-media artist, and the essayist.
We squeeze in close, make just enough room for everyone to have a seat. We eat our catered food off their cobalt blue ceramic dishes, drink donated red wine out of their cups.
As it grows dark outside, the ocean view becomes implied, and we become less implied. We are reflected back to ourselves in the glass under the dim light of a low-hanging fixture, more easily seen by the neighbors walking their dogs or walking themselves around the neighborhood. We leave rings of donated red wine on their real-wood tabletop, talk and laugh so loudly that the porcelain teacups and family heirlooms rattle nervously in the cabinet, unused to so much vitality and bass.
We sit on display, swirl the wine, talk about what it means to be black artists (preservation).
They use us, steal our work, force us to compromise.
But how else can we get our art out into the world?
How else can our story be heard?
I mean, we have to do it, right?
Yeah, we have to do it.
It just sucks that we have to do it like this.
It does. It really does.
But it’s worth it.
Oh, it’s totally worth it.
All we have to do is take the cheese without disturbing the trap.
Easy.
We talk about what it’s like to be nice white liberals (speculation). To live in this town without having a real big special talent, influence, or fame. To live here not as a somebody but as an anybody.
Fauci perjured himself while arguing with Rand Paul. A ton of documents obtained by the left-wing Intercept site demonstrate that the US Government really and truly had been funding outsourced gain-of-function biological weapons research at the Wuhan Lab in China. But Stephen L. Miller thinks Fauci’s going to get away with it. The Deep State and the Media and Big Tech will protect him.
I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate.
Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let’s examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept. It claims that documents show Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as the American National Institute of Health, outsourced gain-of-function research (the manipulation of protein spikes in natural-born viruses to increase transmissibility in humans) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance.
This has long been suspected, as the role the United States government, and Fauci himself, has come under scrutiny amid a deadly pandemic that researchers now believe has killed around 15 million worldwide.
I want to go back to the transcript of Sen. Rand Paul’s fiery exchange with Fauci on July 20. Paul said, ‘On your last trip to our committee on May 11, you stated that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And yet, gain of function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr Shi and was funded by the NIH.’ Sen. Paul was referring to Fauci’s statement in front of Congress on May 11 in which he said, ‘With all due respect, you are entirely, completely incorrect,’ and continued by claiming that NIH ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ Fauci also hedged this response by saying that he has no accounting of what the Chinese might be doing in the Wuhan lab.
According to documents obtained and viewed by Intercept reporters, we now know that Fauci’s agency and the NIH both did approve grants to EchoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak in May 2014. The name of the project was ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.’ One of the site locations for this grant was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. At the top of the grant document, viewed by me via the Intercept’s reporting, is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — Fauci’s agency. Fauci can certainly claim this grant was approved without his knowledge, but that wouldn’t fit with his reputation in the media of being among the most qualified health experts in the country.
Fauci can also claim the money and research granted to EcoHealth Alliance was done without his knowledge, but emails released earlier this year show that he had a relationship with Peter Daszak, the single most mysterious person involved in any of this. (Daszak is not an American citizen so putting him in front of Congress is, needless to say, tricky.) Fauci’s only line of defense is to play on the naiveté of a media that has lionized him and continues to state that the Chinese government simply went rogue and used NIH funding for their own purposes. But that would contradict his own theory, which he stands by in the face of mounting evidence, that a bat simply flew into a bowl of soup, resulting in 15 million deaths.
“Meantime he has a nobler monument than can be built of marble or of brass. His monument is the adoration of the South; his shrine is in every Southern heart.”
–Thomas Nelson Page
“He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.”
–Benjamin Harvey Hill (former Confederate Senator from Georgia), 1874.
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A speech given by President Jefferson Davis at the formation of the Lee Monument Association in Richmond, following the death of General Robert E. Lee.
[Richmond, Virginia – November 3, 1870]
“Soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, comrades and friends”:
Assembled on this sad occasion, with hearts oppressed with the grief that follows the loss of him who was our leader on many a bloody battle-field, a pleasing though melacholy spectacle is presented. Hitererto, and in all times, men have been honored when successful, but here is the case of one who, amid disaster, went down to his grave, and those who were his companions in misfortune have assembled to honor his memory. It is as much an honor to you who give as to him who receives, for above the vulgar test of merit you show yourselves competent to discriminate between him who enjoys and he who deserves success.
Robert E. Lee was my associate and friend in the military academy, and we were friends until the hour of his death. We were associates and friends when he was a soldier and I a congressman; and associates and friends when he led the armies of the Confederacy and I presided in its Cabinet. We passed through many sad scenes together, but I cannot remember that there was ever aught but perfect harmony between us. If ever there was difference of opinion it was dissipated by discussion, and harmony was the result. I repeat, we never disagreed, and I may add that I never in my life saw in him the slightest tendency to self-seeking. It was not his to make a record, it was not his to shift blame to other shoulders; but it was his with an eye fixed upon the welfare of his country, never faltering to follow the line of duty to the end. His was the heart that braved every difficulty; his was the mind that wrought victory out of defeat.
He has been charged with “want of dash.” I wish to say that I never knew Lee to falter to attempt anything ever man could dare. An attempt has also been made to throw a cloud upon his character because he left the army of the United States to join in the struggle for the liberty of his State. Without trenching at all upon politics, I deem it my duty to say one word in reference to this charge. Virginian born, descended from a family illustrious in Virginia’s annals, given by Virginia to the service of the United States, he represented her in the Military Academy at West Point. He was not educated by the Federal Government, but by Virginia; for she paid her full share for the support of that institution, and was entitled to demand in return the services of her sons. Entering the army of the United States, he represented Virginia there also, and nobly. On many a hard-fought field Lee was conspicuous, battling for his native State as much as for the Union. He came from Mexico crowned with honors, covered by brevets, and recognized, young as he was, as one of the ablest of his country’s soldiers. And to prove that he was estimated then as such, let me tell you that when Lee was a captain of engineers stationed in Baltimore the Cuban Junta in New York selected him to be their leader in the struggle for the independence of their native country. They were anxious to secure his services, and offered him every temptation that ambition could desire. He thought the matter over, and, I remember, came to Washington to consult me as to what he should do, and when I began to discuss the complications which might arise from his acceptance of the trust he gently rebuked me, saying that this was not the line upon which he wished my advice, the simple question was “Whether it was right or not.” He had been educated by the United States, and felt wrong to accept place in the army of a foreign power. Such was his extreme delicacy, such was the nice sense of honor of the gallant gentleman whose death we deplore. But when Virginia withdrew – the State to whom he owed his first and last allegiance – the same nice sense of honor led him to draw his sword and throw it in the scale for good or for evil. Pardon me for this brief defence of my illustrious friend.
When Virginia joined the Confederacy, Robert Lee, the highest officer in the little army of Virginia, came to Richmond, and not pausing to inquire what woud be his rank in the service of the Confederacy, went to Western Virginia under the belief that he was still an officer of the State. He came back, carrying the heavy weight of defeat and unappreciated by the people whom he served, for they could not know, as I knew, that if his plans and orders had been carried out the result would have been victory rather than retreat. You did not know, for I would not have known it had he not breathed it in my ear only at my earnest request, and begging that nothing be said about it. The clamor which then arose followed him when he went to South Carolina, so that it became necessary on his going to South Carolina to write a letter to the Governor of that State, telling him what manner of man he was. Yet, through all this, with a magnanimity rarely equalled, he stood in silence, without defending himself or allowing others to defend him, for he was unwilling to offend any one who was wearing a sword and striking blows for the Confederacy.
Mr. Davis then spoke of the straits to which the Confederacy was reduced, and of the danger to which her capital was exposed just after the battle of Seven Pines, and told how General Lee had conceived and executed the desperate plan to turn their flank and rear, which, after seven days of bloody battle, was crowned with the protection of Richmond, while the enemy was driven far from the city. The speaker referred also to the circumstances attending General Lee’s crossing the Potomac and the march into Pennsylvania. He (Mr. Davis) assumed the responsibility for that movement. The enemy had long been concentrating his force, and it was evident that if they continued their steady progress the Confederacy would be overwhelmed. Our only hope was to drive him to the defence of his own capital, we being enabled in the meantime to reinforce our shattered army. How well Gen. Lee carried out that dangerous experiment need not be told. Richmond was relieved, the Confederacy was relieved, and time was obtained, if other things had favored, to reinforce the army.
But, said Mr. Davis, I shall not attempt to review the military career of our fallen Chieftain. Of the man, how shall I speak? He was my friend, and in that word is included all that I could say of any man. His moral qualities rose to the height of his genius. Self denying – always intent upon the one idea of duty – self-controlled to an extent that many thought him cold. His feelings were really warm, and his heart melted freely at the sight of a wounded soldier or the story of the sufferings of the widow and orphan. During the war he was ever conscious of the inequality of the means at his control; but it was never his to complain or to utter a doubt – It was always his to do. When in the last campaign he was beleaguered at Petersburg, and painfully aware of the straights to which we were reduced, he said: “With my army in the mountains of Virginia I could carry on this war for twenty years longer.” His men exhausted and his supplies failing, he was unable to carry out his plans. An untoward event caused him to anticipate the movement and the Army of Northern Virginia was overwhelmed. But in the surrender he anticipated conditions that have not been fulfilled – he expected his army to be respected and his paroled soldiers to be allowed the enjoyments of life and property. Whether these conditions have been fulfilled, let others say.
Here he now sleeps in the land he loved so well, and that land is not Virginia only, for they do injustice to Lee who believe he fought only for Virginia. He was ready to go anywhere, on any service for the good of his country, and his heart was as broad as the fifteen States struggling for the principles that our forefathers fought for in the Revolution of 1776. He is sleeping in the same soil with the thousands who fought under the same flag, but first offered up their lives. Here the living are assembled to honor his memory, and there the skeleton sentinels keep watch over his grave. This citizen! this soldier! this great general! this true patriot! left behind him the crowning glory of a true Christian. His Christianity ennobled him in life, and affords us grounds for the belief that he is happy beyond the grave.
But, while we mourn the loss of the great and the true, drop we also tears of sympathy with her who was his help-meet in life – the noble woman who, while her husband was in the field leading the Army of the Confederacy, though an invalid herself, passed the time in knitting socks for the marching soldiers! A woman fit to be the mother of heroes – and heroes are descended from her. Mourning with her, we can only offer the consolation of a Christian. Our loss is not his, but he now enjoys the rewards of a life well spent and a never wavering trust in a risen Saviour. This day we unite our words of sorrow with those of the good and great throughout Christendom, for his fame is gone over the water – his deeds will be remembered; and when the monument we build shall have crumbled into dust, his virtues will still live, a high model for the imitation of generations yet unborn.
–From The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 12, pp 502-506. Transcribed from the Richmond Dispatch, November 4, 1870.
Hector O’ hEoghagain (“O’Hogan” to you and me), a popular Irish television presenter, went hunting with the famous Scarteen Black and Tan Kerry Beagles in November of 2012 for a program episode broadcast in February 2013.
Jean-Paul Sartre admired the Soviet Union, while Albert Camus despised it. In 1950, when North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea, Camus said to Sartre: “What will happen to you when the Russians invade France? Perhaps the hyena with a fountain pen would not be allowed to have the last laugh?” Stalin’s cultural commissar, Alexander Fadayev, had earlier called Sartre, “a jackal with a typewriter, a hyena with a fountain pen.”
