Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I was walking around in the Dollar Tree Store [Everything’s a dollar or less] when the manager came on the intercom:
“Dollar Tree shoppers! Don’t forget to pick up an item of school supplies for military dependents starting school in the fall. Pencils, pens, tablets, erasers, any item related to school. Dollar Tree will make sure it reaches the dependents of active military personnel.”
My hand stopped midway to a jar of Kosher dills. “Eh? My hearing’s really going to hell. For a minute I thought she said something about donating school supplies to military kids. Sheeze!”
But when she finished ringing up my purchases the cashier smiled and met my eye. “Would you like to buy some pencils or a tablet for military dependents starting school?”
I went snake-eyes. “You think I’m stupid for shopping here, don’t you?” I slid my hat back exposing my forehead. “Do I have a sign saying STUPUD tattooed up there?”
She tried to say something but I butted in. “Got a program so’s I can buy schools supplies for kids of crack whores? Kids of people in prison? Likely they really need it.”
The lady blushed. “They make us ask. I didn’t do it.”
“Here!” I pulled a dollar bag of flour out of one of the sacks. “Give them that if you can find one who knows how to cook something. Otherwise give them shopping carts and point them to your dumpster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I give food to beggars. Not something they can sell or trade for drugs and whiskey.”
Soooo. Evidently the military folks aren’t even giving their families money for school supplies these days. Shouldn’t be long before their kids are darting out of alleyways surrounding people waiting at bus stops or traffic lights. “You wanta buy watch? Ring? Skivvy pictures?
Learned it from mom and dad who learned it overseas. Nice scam.
Back when they had the draft, conscripting people for $100 per month, wives and kids moving in with relatives, nobody thought of that one. Now they’re all volunteers for undeclared presidential wars, helping bankrupt the federal budget with their salaries and benefits, they’re panhandling. Trying to mooch off hamburger flippers and other minimum-wage-earners scrimping by shopping at Dollar Tree.
Neighbor: “Did you hear what the Governor of Texas did about Obamacare?
Me: “I don’t know who’s Governor of Texas. Don’t care what he did about anything. Don’t know nothing about Obama, Obamacare, nothing.”
Neighbor: “Well you’d better find out!”
Me: “I don’t go to doctors. Haven’t been to one in 20, 25 years. If I can get out of here before the election I might be able to go through the next presidential term without knowing who’s president.”
Neighbor shakes head frowning, shrugs. The Universe pauses in anticipation of the next topic of conversation.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
A while back I was talking on the phone with my bud, Rich, in North Carolina. He’d just returned from a visit to the Georgia Guidestones and was telling me about them, and the general history of the area where they’re located. One anecdote involved the local hero of the American Revolutionary War.
Seems there was a woman settler in the area famous enough for her contribution to be recognized as a hero and locally a focus of veneration. She got a bunch of British soldiers drunk and murdered them while they slept.
I don’t doubt a few more dead enemy soldiers was a boon at the time, but I found myself wondering how the woman felt about it after the dust settled, say three, four decades later. It ain’t as though your average British soldier was a lot different than the people he was fighting against at the time. Just grunts, following orders, doing what they were told to do, same as soldiers everywhere. Probably it’s possible to assemble a set of reasonings to appreciate the impact the event had on the outcome of the Revolution, but it’s less easy to bring up any admiration for the lady who did it.
In fact, I’d guess her neighbors and husband were careful not to offend her during her time around them later. A person who’d do what she did is nobody to be trifled with.
But thinking about all that led me to consider the whole issue of the way we humans celebrate history. Fairly bizarre, when you consider it carefully. The British celebrate a guy who attempted to blow up Parliament, but was thwarted, for instance. Lots of fireworks, but I wonder if they’re cheering the attempt to do it, or the failure of the effort?
For that matter, I wonder if they do much celebrating out on the Rez, shooting off fireworks and cheering the ethnic memory of, say, Custer’s Last Stand. Or the slaughter of Fetterman’s troops during the Red Cloud uprising. If they don’t, are they being sufficiently true to their own tribal histories?, I speculates.
Or, at least as grotesque, are the black citizens of the projects all over the US going to be cheering for the institution of slavery that brought their ancestors to this geography so’s to allow them to be here, not Africa? Whatever the shortcomings of life in modern US ghettos, probably the average modern resident of their ancestral homelands would gladly change places. Can I hear a few “Amens!” for the institution of slavery in this land concurrent with [gulp, sigh] remembering our noble founding fathers? Their unselfish efforts and sacrifices along the avenue toward ‘freeing themselves’ from British oppression and tyranny?
Is anyone in Georgia going to be singing, Marching Through Georgiatomorrow? Cheering Sherman’s scorched earth burning of Atlanta, and churning across the state burning and looting the citizenry, civilian and military, all the way to Savannah?
Fact is, it all comes out of the same cauldron. Sip a spoonful of it and you have to either like the overall taste, or focus on the flavor of the meat while ignoring the onions and garlic. Here, and everywhere else.
For instance, the Japanese probably have enjoyed their post-WWII / pre-tsunami affluence, freedoms, non-involvement in military adventures. They’d never have gotten any of that without Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, Midway, Tarawa, et al. The destruction of the Japanese Empire.
But I’m betting they don’t have a day of celebration for it.
Probably somewhere in Georgia there’s a community of UK citizens visiting, or living out their lives. Or folks who came here from the UK and became US Citizens. Maybe tomorrow would be a good day for them to visit the Georgia Guidestones, wave a US flag around to acknowledge that history’s a different place for them now, than it used to be. In any case, maybe they ought to be conscious of how much they drink and where they do their drinking. Georgia still has woman patriots.
History’s not an overly hospitable environment without some selectivity and flexibility. Going out tomorrow and killing a few Brits, Japanese, Yankees, whites, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Vietnamese, Apache, Navajo, Lakota, maybe a few Russians for good measure would help everyone remember, better, what patriotism’s all about. Or get’em drunk and cut their throats.
At least it wouldn’t be as boring as a parade. An honest tribute to our ancestors, whomever they might have been, would help us make the same mistakes they did. Which we will.
Old Jules
Who needs fireworks anyway, when you can have the real thing?
Good morning readers. I’m going to have to kick this around with Old Sol while I’m coaxing him up this morning. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you it’s nice seeing something coming out of NASA occasionally a person could consider useful and exciting.
The whole 2008 business about the 8 minute cycling had completely escaped my notice until I came across this at http://spaceweather.com/this morning.
HIDDEN PORTALS IN EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD: A NASA-sponsored researcher at the University of Iowa has developed a way for spacecraft to hunt down hidden magnetic portals in the vicinity of Earth. These gateways link the magnetic field of our planet to that of the sun, setting the tage for stormy space weather. [video]
“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”
Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency’s fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA’s five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. “They’re real,” says Sibeck.
Now that Cluster and THEMIS have directly sampled FTEs, theorists can use those measurements to simulate FTEs in their computers and predict how they might behave. Space physicist Jimmy Raeder of the University of New Hampshire presented one such simulation at the Workshop. He told his colleagues that the cylindrical portals tend to form above Earth’s equator and then roll over Earth’s winter pole. In December, FTEs roll over the north pole; in July they roll over the south pole.
Sibeck believes this is happening twice as often as previously thought. “I think there are two varieties of FTEs: active and passive.” Active FTEs are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through rather easily; they are important conduits of energy for Earth’s magnetosphere. Passive FTEs are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal structure does not admit such an easy flow of particles and fields. (For experts: Active FTEs form at equatorial latitudes when the IMF tips south; passive FTEs form at higher latitudes when the IMF tips north.) Sibeck has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and he is encouraging his colleagues to hunt for signs of them in data from THEMIS and Cluster. “Passive FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them we can’t be sure.”
There are many unanswered questions: Why do the portals form every 8 minutes? How do magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil? “We’re doing some heavy thinking about this at the Workshop,” says Sibeck.
If NASA’s going to be throwing money around like a drunken sailor it’s good to know sometimes it hits something worth knowing. Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then, I reckons.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I went to town a few days ago to get the stolen car covered by liability insurance, and when I returned the Great Speckled Bird was defunct. Evidently decided it was better to take his chances on ending up in a factory farm for chickens next lifetime than put up with more of Old Sol’s blessings during this one.
Naturally his passing stirred things up considerably here. The bachelor roosters were promoted to full-fledged hen-chasers and released to free range daily, sleep with the flock, nights. But it’s also caused an undercurrent of rumors. Whisperings and quiet cluckings nights when the doers can’t be identified and prosecuted. Claims that it wasn’t just the heat offed TGSB, but radioactive fallout.
It’s partly my own fault. One of the felines was probably sneaking a look when I was reading trivia such as the article below:
Gen. Stubblebine’s prognosis is dire: “When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.
“. . . The US Government’s statistics document an excess death rate of 20,000 US residents, mostly healthy infants, in the first 9 months following the multiple nuclear events at Fukushima. .As a humanitarian, strategist, intelligence analyst, father and grandfather, General Bert understands that doing nothing is, quite simply, not an option.
“. . . The lack of information is, however, a matter of State policy in Japan where it is now a felony offense to discuss negative aspects of either nuclear power or the Fukushima situation in particular.”
Old General Bert’s correct, the cats, chickens and I all agree. Doing nothing is not an option. But as Commander in Chief around here, I’m not aware of a damned thing I can do, nor of anything the cats and chickens can do to influence whether the Northern Hemisphere becomes largely uninhabitable.
Any more than we can do anything about this heat wave, except hunker down and try to think of ways to not follow TGSB into the next incarnation. And maybe try to find something useful to occupy ourselves despite the standing 8-count we’re all trying to function in.
For starters, I’m declaring martial law within the hearing-radius of the cabin and henhouse. Japan, at least, can be accused of doing something, even though not a damned thing can be done. I’m taking a page from Japan’s book and making it a criminal offence for any item of poultry, feline, or human being here to say, “Damn it’s hot.” Or, “Reckon how radioactive it is today?”
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I’ve been pondering this strange dearth of political bumper-stickers, which seems to me to be unprecedented for a year of national elections. Particularly contests over who’s to be king. Maybe it’s just the fact it doesn’t matter anymore. The scrapings of US production so far gone what’s left isn’t worth stealing.
But maybe there’s another factor at work.
One of the big let-downs of the post WWII era for kings, king-makers, wannabe kings and king-makers, war profiteers, and economic shell-game artists, was the citizenry. They were stupid, but not as stupid as they needed to be to satisfy the hopes and expectations of those who needed their [preferably active, but at leat tacit] consent to be gang raped.
By the end of the Vietnam War it became obvious that, aside from a few mindless flag-wavers and a re-definition of the word ‘patriot’, most of the citizenry wouldn’t support long-duration undeclared wars, for instance. Even when the body-bags only contained volunteers. Even when the sacrifices were disguised in exponential growth of national debt.
Frustrating, tricky business. Constantly having to dream up Wars on Poverty, Wars on Drugs, Wars on Terrorism to keep them from noticing their pocketbooks and jobs were going away. Convincing them the reason was undocumented workers, non-Christian religious fanatics, and the folks who couldn’t find jobs.
Maybe there’s just a growing realization within the population that it’s already been robbed of everything of value, that it allowed itself to be surrounded with cops, mercenaries, a huge prison system, sophisticated weaponry, and personal debt it can never repay.
And not a single name they could put on a bumper sticker who isn’t a part of what did it, will continue doing it.
Maybe they’re finally just saying, “To hell with it. They can kill me, but they can’t eat me.” At least not until someone discovers a way for politicians, bankers, multi-national chief executives, and dynastic wealthy to live longer by ‘donated’ body parts of the citizenry as a means of collecting personal debts or paying off national ones.
Good morning readers. I appreciate your visit and read. I hope you won’t consider this frivolous.
It’s Daddy Day, and there’s a growing body of shrill opinion being expressed on the Web concerning those out-of-control nuclear reactors in Japan and how Big Daddy United States needs to step up to the plate to fix it. Even though Big Daddy has no more clue than anyone else how to go about doing it.
First off, those reactors haven’t reached their full potential yet, so it’s probably too soon to have the Lincoln Memorial try to jump a motorcycle across them.
Even though PT Barnham’s loose in Washington and trying to perfect that method of solving historical difficulties, jumping a motorcycle across the problem is still considered extreme, untested, uncertain, at best.
Probably it would be better to try time-tested methods first. Some of the ways Big Daddy US has solved other pesky difficulties. Homeland Security and attempts to deal with illegal immigration might provide a model.
Or failing that, there’s always the old airbag fix:
Anyone strangled to death by an airbag isn’t going to be worrying about mutants, teeth falling out, that sort of thing.
Sending some crews of jailbirds out to pick the fallout up before it can do any damage offers some hope. Got lots of jailbirds and not-all-that-much radiation yet. If the radiation increases, hell it won’t do it faster than our number of prisons.
People who never learned to program a VCR, [including me] might find radiation detection instruments confusing, so sniffer dogs trained to detect it could answer the question of where it is and where it ain’t.
Naturally they’d have to be provided facilities.
And protection from reckless drivers.
Failing that, a little magic might help.
Or just an acknowledgement there’s a problem.
If everything else fails, this worked for grandaddy and there’s no reason to think it won’t work again.
The Japanese have never been all that receptive to allowing imports from the US, but I’ll bet they’d welcome a few shiploads of those signs. And there’s potential for a new manufacturing industry here to replace what went to Asia.
It ain’t as though there’s nothing to do in a fallout shelter.
Big Daddy’s tour d’force is entertainment. Still is. Never been better.
You can’t argue with a history of success. I say, “Let’s go for it!” What are we waiting for?
It was flags and God Bless Americasigns I noticed mostly in Kerrville last trip in. Had me wondering whether something was going on I’d missed.
Here’s a country where they’re still planting grass in the suburban yards so they can mow it at $3.50+ per gallon for the mowers, giant television sets, shiny new doolies, SUVs, RVs and golf courses demanding more blessings because the ones already provided don’t fill the cup.
But maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe God Bless America’s a parenthetical statement:
(Help me God, because the onliest people I’ve got to choose from are all going to provide me with more undeclared wars, ship more jobs overseas, bail out more banks, automobile companies, allow my savings to be ravaged, and treat my Social Security as though it were welfare beggings.)
I dunno. Seems to me this nation’s enjoyed considerable blessings for the duration of the lives of everyone living in it. Even those living on the streets, on the Reservations, just about everywhere, compared to a great majority of the less-deserving who didn’t manage to get born here.
If there’s a diety out there looking for advice maybe a “Thankee!” would get a better hearing than, “Gimme more!”
Maybe it’s time to belly up to the bar and recognize that life’s a tough place to live and sometimes people have to live it without giant television sets and new SUVs. Judging by the people the US public have selected to look out for their interests it would take a diety a lot more forgiving than the one a majority of believers believe in to heap more blessings on those demanding them.
Thowing good money after bad isn’t one of the traits attributed to the usual diety.
Monsanto is also the world’s largest manufacturer of synthetic bovine growth hormone, injected into cows in order to stimulate greater milk production. The widespread pressure by the company to use the chemical and the subsequent measures taken by Monsanto to suppress information regarding the potential health risks sparked uproar among American farmers.
When dairy producers that did not use Monsanto’s products began labeling their products as “Hormone Free” or “Organic”, Monsanto slapped them with a lawsuit as recently as 2008, claiming the labels amounted to negative advertising against hormone-produced milk.
Director of corporate communications for Monsanto, Phil Angell, summed up Monsanto’s take on the issue in a report by food author Michael Pollan for New York Times Magazine in 1998:“Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is FDA’s job.”
Michael Taylor, a former attorney for the US Department of Agriculture and lobbyist for Monsanto, was recently appointed to a federal role as the deputy commissioner for foods at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Since then, the FDA shot down requests from consumer protection groups to label genetically modified products as such. With a White House-Monsanto connection already established with the appointment of Taylor, PEER and others are interested in what other ties could exist between the two.
Heck, readers. There ought to be something a verbose man such as myself could think of to say about all this. I’d do it, too, if I could think of something.
Maybe I could point out those pointee-heads working three shifts in the Monsanto laboratories would call themselves ‘scientists’ if someone asked what they are. Same as the folks over at CERN.
Or maybe I could just ask the reasonable question: “Do you honestly believe one of the two breeds of foxes guarding the hen house is going to leave more feathers lying around when the dust settles?”
I don’t know much about art, except knowing what I wouldn’t want to fall on me. Most artists I’ve known were just doing it for the same reasons I write things down. They mostly just did it without wondering why. And I’ve always suspected most of them secretly hoped some piece of it would survive them.
Probably the same is true of the people all over the backassed places who scratched things on rocks or painted pictures a person today often has difficulty understanding.
But sometimes in the heat of the moment those artists pulled off coups leaving no doubt what was being said, why it was being said. Messages speaking of events in their lives still able to increase the heartbeat of a viewer looking from another world. Another reality. Another time. For instance, of the hundreds of petroglyphs I’ve seen in my life, a couple come to mind that satisfy that description.
One’s in the desert east of Socorro, New Mexico. Under a cliff overhang 50, maybe 100 yards long someone a long time ago painted [yeah, I know. Not a petroglyph per se] a series of scenes of people wearing jockstraps pulling men in armor off horses, beating them to death, stabbing them, generally giving them whatfer.
I’m only speculating on this, but I’ve always suspected that scene depicts a piece of action took place with scouts or the rear-guard of the Spaniards retreating from New Mexico fleeing the Terrors. The Revolt of 1690. The route passed within a few miles of there, some maybe right across it.
The other is in Frijole Canyon a few miles upgrade from Bandera. Three guys in jockstraps surrounding a bear ten times their size and a dozen times their ugly. The two on the sides have spears in positions to thrust. The third is in front of the bear, close, spear broken, bear paw with claws outstretched on the way to adjusting the future to contain one fewer human being.
But I’ve digressed.
Modern art’s more subtle and a lot of it probably won’t last so long. To clarify the message, modern artists frequently add words. Not everyone’s able to just look at a painted likeness of a horney toad and recognize the underlying action, profundity, statement about the human condition represented.
A lot of people might, for example, glance at this and assume they’re seeing an automobile with red headlights belonging to some wealthy person, ready to toodle off to the hair dresser or enjoy a $5.00 cup of Latte somewhere.
But the reality is somewhere else entirely. That steel plate depicts a piece of modern life most folks never get around to acknowledging. KEEP TEXAS WILD is the only way the artist managed to convey the work has a deeper meaning.
Because what you’re seeing is men in Texas living behind bars, being gang raped by their fellow prisoners. Being forced to join White Aryan Brotherhood, the Crips, other prison gangs as an alternative to constantly having the crap beaten out of them, being forced to perform oral sex on the competing ethnic group, experiencing growth experiences of the anal sphincter.
You’re seeing prosecuting attorneys increasing their power, their office space, their staffs. You’re seeing opportunities for advancement to judgeships. You’re seeing money allocated to new cars, sophisticated weaponry, better copshops.
You’re seeing legions of defense attorneys wallowing around in money Scrooge McDuck-like, circulating the product through the system.
And you’re seeing corporate America at its best, building and operating private prisons. Discovering a new product while it was sending all the others outside US borders to be manufactured. A product able to be used over and over to feed the necessities of the artists: private hotels for the artists and guards to admire their work.
And a plea to keep Texas wild. Wild enough to need more of the same. Wild enough to keep the money rolling in. Wild enough to keep things interesting while the products enjoy brief interludes outside with the rest of us.
Seems to me overall that’s a pretty decent piece of art. Even though it’s obviously one of a numbered series.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 