Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
When I post a blog I frequently do so in complete ignorance of current events. I don’t have a television, the radio never gets turned on, and I don’t read newspapers or magazines until they sometimes fall into my hands many years after they were printed.
I don’t know and don’t wish to know who wants to be king. The Challenge of 2012: Not Knowing Who Wants to be King And I’m not likely to get any joy from knowing which readers prefer which liar and scoundrel, and which prefer some other one. I have no intention to participate in the scramble to assassinate characters of the occupants of one side of the pool of corruption to give advantage to the occupants of the other side of the pool.
If a post here manages to convey an impression I’m giving support to one political illusion over another, it’s entirely by accident and not to be taken as a launchpad for more intense and focused discourse on the issue.
I didn’t say this in the post because I didn’t think it needed saying, but I think it might.
I’ve got nothing bad to say about Mormons. I’ve never been ill-treated by them, cheated by them, lied to by them so far as I know. The ones I’ve met have generally been solid, hard-working, honest people. Seemingly more so compared to the impression I’ve been left with in my seven decades of experience with the remainder of the population. Christians, Gentile, Jew, atheist, Muslim and agnostic. Even Buddhists, Taoists, Hindu, and the herd of New Age Gurus. Even Hopi Elders and Ambiguous Native American Shamans.
My interest in Mormons came to being with the gradual realization that the parties involved in the lost gold mine I searched for so many years were predominantly Mormons. It was a factor left entirely out of the legend as it came out of the 19th Century and it required years of research to uncover that fact. The cousin of one of the central characters was evidently the second wife of Brigham Young. Family names of the lost gold mine participants also show up among people involved in Mountain Meadows.
The timing on the lost gold mine incident and that of the Mountain Meadows massacre originally drew my interest.
What Mormons believe about polygamy, same-sex marriages, almost anything at all has no bearing on my impression and generally benevolent attitude toward them as a whole. In areas where we disagree I’m willing to forgive them for being wrongheaded, same as I try to forgive everyone else who disagrees with me. Otherwise I’d be forever having to keep score of who was right in this world, and who is wrong. It just ain’t worth the effort even those relatively few areas where I can’t restrain myself from having an opinion.
I’m re-reading The Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Juanita Brooks at the moment. Twenty or thirty years ago when I submerged myself in everything I could find about the event I concluded the Brooks work was the best out there. When it came into my hands again recently I held back beginning it again to savor the anticipation. Now I’m midway through it again and it’s as fine a piece of research as ever.
Brooks was a Mormon lady, which made the Mountain Meadows Massacre a work of courage on her part. The LDS church had spent a century suppressing the realities about the mass homicide of an estimated 60-120 men, women, and children of the Fancher wagon train journeying through Utah to California in 1857, by Mormons and members of a tribe of Native Americans.
The event happened at a time when there was plenty of massacre going on across North America, but was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, because the people involved were Mormons killing Christians, as opposed to Christians killing Mormons, and the motivation wasn’t acquisition of territory belonging to someone else. Second, because the circumstances surrounding the massacre involved ‘normal’, dutiful, pious people behaving in ways anyone outside the context could only consider far from normal. Believing the killing was defensively justified and necessary.
Brooks establishes clearly and thoroughly that the heads of the LDS ordered the massacre and that John Lee, who’d been hanged for it and handed full responsibility by the LDS Church, was carrying out those orders.
An excellent read for anyone interested in history, human behavior, duty, and the ability of the human mind to justify anything it applies itself to.
All that’s over there until the first post tomorrow is the single-post archive migrated from Facebook. But if you’d care to go for a look at the archive it might give you an insight into the general drift.
I’m posting this today in hopes of discovering whether anything needs changing, whether the navigation works, and to just give anyone interested a gander at it. If you click it and find there’s a problem of any sort I’d be obliged if you’d send her an email, post it here, or let us know by mental telepathy.
Seems the advantages of being out of sight and out of mind for most of the population aren’t necessarily advantages when the out-of-sight geography includes something a multi-national corporation wants. All those city folks needing to keep the air conditioners turned down to 70 and to be able to light up the hair dryers every morning probably never ask themselves where the electricity popped out of the ground and hopped into the wires they plug things into.
One more bug on the windshield of civilization. Old Jules
[The following letter was written by former Hopi Tribe chairman Benjamin H. Nuvamsa from Shungopavi. He presented the letter to the Hopi Tribal Council on Friday January 13, 2012]
January 13, 2012
Hopi Tribal Council
Hopi – Tewa Senom
It is time we have a serious discussion about coal mining on our reservation, our water rights and our environment. For far too long, we have pushed these issues aside, not willing to talk about how these issues impact our lives. We must talk about how the Peabody Western Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station are affecting our lives. Since the mid 1960’s, Peabody Coal has been mining our coal, pumping our precious Navajo Aquifer water and paying us pennies on the dollar in return. Navajo Generating Station is emitting dangerous and harmful particulates into the air we breathe. Our coal resources are being depleted. Our Navajo Aquifer has been damaged…
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties. Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid. Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.
One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet. The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.
The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them. Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.
A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time. I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.
But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own. One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico. The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal. Back during the Y2K time.
Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico. The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.
I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.
Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening. It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.
I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round. It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.
I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.
The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.
Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.
There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.
As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.
Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t. Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.
But you have to admit, even the Chinese can’t do fireworks to compete. Some things just can’t be pulled off with the combination of cheap labor and US politicians dancing for multi-national corporations and banks.
Old Sol’s got his own cheap labor, I’m guessing.
And if he does they’re not forever counting themselves up to calculate whether they could march four abreast into the sea without wearing thin on the patience of everyone else.
I’m in the doghouse with all the cats this morning, but especially with Hydrox. The invadercat came in just at dark last night while I was feeding the can of cat food to the four belongers. Sat there 20-30 feet off the porch just watching.
Irked the bejesus out of Hydrox, especially, because I was taking its picture and talking to it instead of running it the hell off. This morning Hydrox is being standoffish and treating me with a disdain I rarely see in him.
But you’ve got to admit that looks like a pretty good cat, though I’m not going to let it stay around here. I don’t need any more cats and it’s well enough groomed to argue it has a home somewhere, anyway.
Hydrox and the other can relax, once they’ve punished me a while for causing them a momentary doubt about feline population projections for 2012.
I’ve mentioned guineas a number of times here, but I suspect some of you folks might never have seen one. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re constantly moving faster than you can realize until you try snapping a pic of them.
They look a bit like a cross between a turkey vulture and a pheasant. Most biologists believe the species leaked over here from a parallel universe and they’ve never quite managed to get a grip on this reality.
The biologists might be correct, but my personal theory is that they escaped from a Larry Niven novel, one of the Tales of Known Space from the 1970s and 1980s. Likely as not they were developed by the race that created the Bandersnatchi.
Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.
“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”
Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions. Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick. I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.
“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here? You and me? You and all the cats?” He glared at me. “You, the cats and the chickens?”
I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this. I felt a tirade in the making. “Just you cats and me. The chickens can’t be part of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.” He gestured with his nose toward the porch. “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense. It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”
His frustration was obvious. “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are. For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me. And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”
This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything. “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’. When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’. But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving? Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”
He waited while I considered it. “I suppose I don’t.”
“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”
The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking. Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life.
When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined. The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy.
“Do you have proof of residence?”
“There’s my driver’s license.”
“That’s not enough. I need a utility bill or tax return.”
“I didn’t bring that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy. And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.
Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure. In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries. When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with. In Washington, D.C. In Austin, Texas.
And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.
“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.
Old Jules
“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while. But the skunk-instincts and chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in. The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.” Josephus Minimus
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a visit.
The Toothless Soothsayer was going to be my post for today, but as I was working on it yesterday I accidently hit the ‘PUBLISH’ button and it became history.
It’s going to be a busy day here. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been to town for provisions and I’ve got a list two-pages long of things I’ve runned out of already, or that I’m down to bare bones on. The cats have been threatening to go on strike if I don’t get some other flavors of canned food, the chickens are fighting the cats for dry cat food, and the deer are complaining about what’s available to steal from the felines and chickens.
I thought I’d stocked up enough on the old kind of cheap lightbulbs, but the cheapo ones burn out a lot faster than a person might expect. I’m hoping I can find a few more on the shelves to snag before lightbulb-Y2K happens.
Most of you probably haven’t noticed what’s happened to the price of feed grains, but I expect you’ll be seeing it on the grocery shelves in the form of pricetags before long. The price of chicken scratch is up about 25 percent from sometime a while back, and layer pellets up almost that.
The flock is free ranging a lot further than they used to because I’ve cut down of how much I put out for them. It’s a tightrope, making sure they have enough to supplement their forage, but keeping it down to a level so’s they don’t waste it, which they’ll do. They’ve always been spoiled, profligate, ungrateful birds. But now they’re being driven by necessity to range out a quarter-mile, which is the idea behind free-rangers but too good for them to allow them to appreciate it.
A while back my laser mouse with a cord went out, and digging around I found a cordless one I’d never been satisfied with from several years ago. Out of hunger I put a couple of triple-A batteries in it and found it worked okay. Couldn’t recall why I’d abandoned it.
Then I discovered it goes through batteries something ugly. It’s a gas hog and I don’t think my need to have a cordless mouse is worth the price of keeping it on the road. Probably it’s going to be me tied to the comp at the end of a fiber-optic cord again.
If you’re travelling out in the vicinity of Grants, New Mexico, and you see the cat at the top of the page, tell her Hydrox, Niaid and I said hello. I doubt you’ll see her because she vanished in 2003 and we figured she’d joined Mehitabels #1 and #2 on permanent mouse patrol.
I must have been four, or maybe five When grandfather said, with a snicker, “Where a man wouldn’t go with a Colt .45 That boy will follow his pecker.”
Half a century now mocks: I’d surely be elated If Papa’s eye had turned to stocks Or land speculated.
I’ve frequently suspected my granddad was speaking from his own experience.
One of the rewards the Universe gave me for getting to be this old was the raging hormones fading into oblivion. There’s still plenty of passion in my life, but it’s of a different nature, and it listens to the voice of reason.
I’d never have believed back when passion was a misery to be endured that the Universe had other passions in mind if a person could just make room for them between the preoccupations.
And yet, today I listen to any one of the songs below and it brings back vivid, pleasant memories of [usually] one woman. The shadow of the past agonies is still there if I choose to examine it, but if I don’t the songs and the passage of time allows it all to be a bit nostalgic. And the songs don’t last long enough to insist on thorough remembering.
Old Jules
(Arirang) Korean Folk Song [She never had an orchestra background that I recall]
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes said things too well. It was one of several I put as a single song on a 90 minute tape and wore out. Live version, no embed: http://youtu.be/GQJAsEZ-S3I
Hank Snow 90 Miles an Hours Down a Deadend Street was another ‘said things too well’.
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 