That’s Pacific Princess wrecked on a reef maybe 100 yards off Kaimana Beach, where monk seals occasionally turn up with and without pups. She’s a long-line fishing boat; we don’t remember how a deep sea vessel ran up on that reef nowhere near the pier where she docks.
The boat just to the right of Pacific Princess is off-loading diesel fuel from the wreck before the first attempt to float it. Out on the horizon is the tender for the tourist submarine Nautilus, which can itself be seen at the far right of the frame.
We’re still in “we” mode in honor of the queen; also we’re calling people varlets. Ourselves, too. “Fetch us our breakfast, varlet!”
We’re trying to get a few days ahead of our self-imposed, entirely arbitrary publishing schedule in order to make time for completing part two of the general strike piece (part one is here). Fortunately we still have a few hundred open browser tabs needing disposal, and a game we used to play called “My Favorite Warlord.”
(The obvious tie-in here is that Gilligan and the skippers of both the Minnow and Pacific Princess could have evaded their fates by jettisoning their cargoes of aging links.)
General Abdul Rashid Dostum has been credibly accused of crimes against humanity, graft, fraud, theft, heroin smuggling and a host of other piquancies. Naturally U.S. leaders made him their lead ally immediately upon entering the graveyard of empires sweepstakes, and accepted his eventual ascension to the defense ministry and eventually the vice-presidency, “vice” being the emphasis there.
For several years in the aughts we regularly searched his name in the news; arrives any kind of Afghanistan fuckery, and there he was.
The penultimately weirdest result — not nearly the worst, but so weird — was in connection with a pair of LSD manufacturers and distributors who were arrested in 2000 for manufacturing and distributing massive, massive quantities of LSD from a retired missile silo in Kansas. At trial, one of them said that the large amount of cash he carried when arrested was not drug proceeds, but rather in service to a U.S. Customs plan to entrap Dostum and derail his heroin smuggling operations.
Here’s the lone contemporaneous story we could find about the affair today, and here’s a record of the appeal following the pair’s conviction, in which Dostum figures briefly. We’ll continue trying to track down the stories.
(We stashed the BTC News archives somewhere safe, we know we did.)
Dostum fled to Turkey when the Taliban regained authority, and “My Favorite Warlord” has not been the same since. We do find him mentioned here threatening civil war as a member of the High Council of National Resistance, which evidently consists of Dostum and fellow warlords bellowing defiance from their respective sanctuaries.
The absolute weirdest Dostum-related BTC News thing was somebody claiming to be a Dostum spokesperson appearing in the comments on one “My Favorite Warlord” post and rather sternly defending his alleged patron’s honor.
Remarkable guy, really, without conscience or heart.
A feature we’ll be adding to the newsletter is Then and Now/Now and Then, which we hope will be self-explanatory. Today’s episode, which begins in 2019, features a Dostum-like lack of conscience and heart. From the March 17, 2021 issue of Mississippi Today:
On a rainy morning in early 2019, two men entered Samantha Conner’s apartment while she lay in bed.
Chateaux Holly Hills Apartments property manager Kevin Casteel and Lowndes County Constable Sonny Sanders were armed with a county-issued gun, a removal warrant and a ruthless interpretation of Mississippi’s eviction law.
Conner, a 44-year-old mother of two, was 16 days late on rent. As punishment, Casteel intended to take everything she owned.
“You don’t understand,” she recalled him yelling as he prevented her from packing her belongings. “All of this is mine.”
Mississippi’s Landlord-Tenant Act, amended in 2018 and 2019, provides that as soon as a judge grants an eviction in court, the landlord may immediately assume ownership of all the tenant’s belongings located on the property, even a trailer home. An eviction is almost always ordered automatically if the tenant is even one day behind on rent and there is no guarantee of a grace period that would give them the time to move.
Conner sued her landlord in federal court, and a federal judge declared the law unconstitutional in December of last year.
“This court can discern no reason why a tenant in plaintiff’s position would have even dreamed, based on the language of the summons, that she would be confronted with the Kafkaesque nightmare which actually transpired in this case. Such things do not happen in America. In forty-nine states in this country, this perception would be correct,” he wrote.
And in April of this year, Mississippi finally enacted a new law offering tenants a three-day grace-period to catch up on their rent, and a week to clear out their belongings after an eviction order is served. Still an obviously vicious law, but better than the previous medieval version.
[Judge] Mills, a former state legislator, wrote in April: “While this court had hoped that the Legislature would act more quickly than it did, it is pleased that it did, eventually, enact legislation which, upon first reading, appears to represent a substantial improvement over the statutes which it declared unconstitutional.”
Nobody should ever struggle for housing. Punching down is a cardinal sin.
So that’s how that goes: then and now.
(Musical contributors to this post include Sonny Landreth, “Blacktop Run;” and Shuggie Otis, “Inter-Fusion.” We’re always looking for music recommendations, old or new; drop ‘em in the comments if you got ‘em.)