LITTLE MISS BEADY EYES

A slightly out of focus phone shot of the Midge. Her white markings are symmetrical. She looks like she's wearing one of those colonial ruffled, lacey, neck thingies that I can't remember the name of right now. Her eyes look green here. But in some lights they are yellow green and sometimes? Heck I don't know for sure.

Little Miss Beady Eyes. She is a compact, almost by the book domestic shorthhair right down to the furry cheeks. Looks like a chipmunk sometimes. That bit of white looks like she got too close to a wall of wet, white paint.

NOW A CAT MOM

Once upon a time, years ago we had four cats. Not including the ones we fed on the porch. By the time we said good by to Springfield we were down to two. Bandit, the big fuzzball, lucked out. The couple that bought the house loved her and she got to stay.

Mom went into assisted living and took the little tuxedo, Midge. The less said about where I spent the last two years the better. However I am also in a decent facility, just not the same one. Mom has been having a lot of breathing problems and it was decided that allergy to the cat was probably one of the the problems. So. About five weeks ago I bacame mom 2. To be honest she has more free space to move in. And Midgie Swivle Ears is slowly learning which strange noises she needs to worry about and which can be ignored.

Which brought back a memory. Actually rereading old journal entries but what the heck. One. We used to watch a lot of war movies. Twelve O'Clock High, Band of Brothers, that sort of thing so a certain degree of explosions were common. Two. Springfield does not get very many thunder storms and most of them don't last very long. One evening we got one of the big ones. A few crashes and the cats are looking around. TV is off. Couple of good crashes overhead and they are getting nervous. "Whatever this is make it stop. You are the humans after all." Half hour after the storm stopped we still had laps full of cats.

Housekeeping was in during lunch. Midge is very tired. She takes her job of replacing the fur on the rug most seriously.

FREEDOM UPDATE

I originally wrote this journal entry back in 2007 not too long after the elections in 2006. Not much has chnged in the past twelve years. in fact some of it is worse. 

The Current Occupant of the White House (I refuse to call this man president) and his advisors continue to claim that we live in the freest country on the planet. Is that true? And what would our ancestors think of the freedom we do have? Who would have thought I'd look back at W and almost miss him. At least there were individuals he would listen to.

We do accept certain limitations on our actions. Most of us obey the speed limit (most of the time), keep most of our clothes on (most of the time and this time of year it’s a necessity) keep certain “recreational activities” indoors where they won’t upset the neighbors and scare the livestock and most of us accept that walking down the middle of a busy freeway at high noon in our birthday suits is probably Not A Good Idea.

But, what of the freedoms that we do seem to have?

The freedom to what the current administration attempt to politicize justice in this country. Claims of voter fraud seem to translate as try to make sure the other party doesn’t win. Competent US attorneys are forced out and replaced with yes men and party hacks. Now it isn't just the attorneys it's almost every appointment.

Voter lists in key states have been purged of minority voters under the guise of making sure that voters with felony records can’t cast a vote. Some states have added voter ID laws and then madd it almost impossible for minority voters to get ID's.

Precincts in at least one key state, Iowa, had more voting machines in suburban precincts than they needed and not enough in inner city precincts that were expected to vote democratic. And enough of the machines didn’t work that potential voters stood in line for hours only to be told to “go home, we’re closing the polls.” And discovering that voting machines and the compters that run them are ridiculously easy to hack into. And that the internet makes it way to easy to spread "fake news." Too many of us are too willing to take every meme at face value and not spend five minutes to see if it's true or when it actually happened. 

The freedom to be a minority voter in rural Texas and find a sheriffs’ cruiser parked near the polls on election day. That little tit bit was in one of Molly Ivins last columns. A hundred and forty years since the end of the Civil War and more than a generation since civil rights and voting rights bills were passed by Congress and signed by earlier presidents and there are still parts of the country where it isn’t safe for minority voters to exercise the most basic right of citizenship. Oregon’s vote by mail looks better all the time. And I just had a really nasty thought. There’s been talk of privatizing mail delivery. You can’t tell the race of a voter from the envelope the mail in ballot is in, but there are parts of the country where you can infer it from the mailing address. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

The freedom to watch contamination spread from the meat supply to farm produce. Those of us who have switched to a largely vegetable diet to avoid contaminated meat and fish get caught in a double bind. Just treat everything as if you’re in a third world country and either cook it or wash it very well. But what happens when one of our freedoms comes to include paying increasingly high prices for clean water? Or pay through the nose for water you know is contaminated and your state government doessn't do a damn thing to require a clean up. 

The freedom to pay low prices for products so poorly made you have to replace them twice as often.

The freedom to watch the contractors that produce these shoddy products move from country to country in search of increasingly cheaper workers while American workers who produced products you’d be proud to own lose their jobs.

The freedom to discover that certain corporations deliberately steer their low paid help to emergency rooms and Medicaid for their care while either offering no insurance or pricing it so high that their employees can’t afford. In other words, we’re subsidizing part of their labor costs with our taxes and insurance premiums while they reap the profit.

The freedom to be herded into “free speech” zones in the name of security whenever our elected hired help comes to town

The freedom to vote for whichever candidate the moneychangers figure they can get the best deal from.

The freedom to attend the church of your choice but discover that only certain groups appear to have a pipeline to the elected hired help.

The freedom to watch the religious right tail wag the political dog. Now the religious right is the dog. 

The freedom to vote for the Democrat or Republican of your choice. There wasn’t much the 2005 session of Oregon legislature could agree on, but they did agree on this, by the time they were done is was much harder for a third party or independent candidate to get on the ballot.

I guess I could go on until I ran out of room but I think I’ve drawn a pretty clear picture. I’m not feeling very free right now, is anyone else?

THE BATTLE ISN'T OVER

OK. The situation isn't as bad as it was when this song was originally released. Or I could be wrong. The Amazon is burning. Our current occupant wants to turn over the Tongass National forest to the strip mining logging companies. Protections for endangered species are being eroded and pollution in this country is actually increasing. Water quality in many areas is going down or is nonexistant.

You Say That the Battle Is Over

John Denver

And you say that the battle is over
And you say that the war is all done
Go tell it to those with the wind in their nose
Who run from the sound of the gun

And write it on the sides of the great whaling ships
Or on ice floes where conscience is tossed
With the wild in their eyes it is they who must die
And it's we who must measure the loss

And you say that the battle is over
And finally the world is at peace
You mean no one is dying and mothers don't weep
Or it's not in the papers at least

There are those who would deal in the darkness of life
There are those who would tear down the sun
And most men are ruthless but some will still weep
When the gifts we were given are gone

Now the blame cannot fall on the heads of a few
It's become such a part of the race
It's eternally tragic that which is magic
Be killed at the end of the glorious chase

From young seals to great whales from waters to wood
They will fall just like weeds in the wind
With fur coats and perfumes and trophies on walls
What a hell of a race to call men

And you say that the battle is over
And you say that the war is all done
Go tell it to those with the wind in their nose
Who run from the sound of the gun

And write it on the sides of the great whaling ships
Or on ice floes where conscience is tossed
With the wild in their eyes it is they who must die
And we who must measure the loss
With the wild in their eyes it is they who must die
And we who will measure the cost

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: David Mallett

You Say That the Battle Is Over lyrics © BMG Rights Management

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Post Katrina back in 2005 I had this little thought for the day.

"For any military types out there who still believe the US can survive even a limited nuclear war I have one word for you. Katrina."

Of the course the ranking military and politicos have bunkers where they believe than can survive, come out, and take up where they left off. Go read a Canticle for Liebowitz. Those politicians, military leaders, and scientists who were believed to have anything to do with what came to be known as, centuries later, the Flame Deluge didn't live very long to give orders about much of anything. The surviving civilians saw to that.

IS THERE REALLY A LION IN MY LIVING ROOM

More like one of these wild, almost look like house cats varieties.

I spotted a documentary on Amazon Prime titled the Lion in Your Living Room. Which I managed to watch for about five minutes. I bailed at the point when a talking head opined that if cats wanted to keep living with humans "they were going to have to change." Beh.

At the same time there was an article linked on FB on How Cats Domesticated Themselves. Humans started farming, grain attracts rodents and other scavengers. Critters that the small wild cats living in Egypt, the Middle East, and China were already hunting. Cats that may have looked like this.

A European wild cat.

A Chinese Mountain Cat.

A Persian Sand Cat.

A Pallas Cat range through Central Asia. Actually about the size of a house cat under all that fur. It gets cold in those mountains and winter lasts a long time. Also a stockier build and shorter legs. A body type found among many animals that have to endure long, cold winters.

Look awfully familar don't they? Except that ourS hang around the farmstead, house, whatever cats apparently didn't have the tabby markings until the fifteen to sixteen hundreds. Kind of funny actually since most of these wild breeds have tabby markings.

When you work down the genetics lions belong in the panthera family. Cheetas and cougars are in another offshoot. And you finally get to the smaller members of the cat family. The felines, that includes our semi domesticated house cats, are in a family by themselves. The Scots have a version of the mountain cat but apparently there has been interbreeding with domesticated cats and only a small portion of the population "pure" bred.

If our house, barn, field cats can interbreed with their wild cousins and produce viable offspring they are not a separate species. Just as dogs can interbreed with wolves.

 And how do housecats behave. Yes they like to cuddle. They also sneak, stalk, and like to find at least three places to hide out. All behaviors you would expect in a wild cat who has to sneak, stalk and find hidey holes where somebody bigger than they are can use them forllunch.

And can you imagine a lion stooping to eating a mouse?

POTATO POTAHTO

I've been rereading my blog entries, this is from 2008. And you probably should read Lisa's entry on dignity or the lack thereof. This is from 2008 and the situation has not improved. 

Lisa writes with feeling about dignity or the lack thereof we’re facing. Lack of community and modern technology have created an unholy alliance that allows us to let it all hang out because nobody knows who we are and go just about anywhere we want in order to do it.

We’ve always pushed the envelope. Cromwell’s commonwealth of plainclothes, closed theaters, whitewashed churches and a ban on celebrating Christmas is offset by the Restoration. Complete with silks, satins, outrageous wigs (and that was for the men), the comedies of Wycherly, and a king who was too much a gentleman to ignore a pretty (and willing partner). Charles II fathered at least a dozen children, acknowledged them all, yet died without a legitimate heir. He was also too much a gentleman to put aside a barren queen.

Regency excess was followed by Victorian whalebone. Clingy empire waistlines gave away to corsets and crinolines. Seventeenth century lace and frills (again for the men) gave way to sober shirtfronts and starched collars.

 America’s Gilded Age was a glittering era of starched shirt fronts, bared shoulders, glittering gems and Robber Barons. The Grover Cleveland of the 1880’s joined list of public men with private affairs (and children born on the “wrong” side of the blanket) that included Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.

The Roaring Twenties gave way to a worldwide economic collapse followed by a World War followed by what I guess you could call the fit in at any cost fifties.

Through the years there was an unwritten code that allowed the private affairs of public men, and women in some cases, to stay private. Was this wink, wink hypocrisy? Or was it simple acknowledgement that no one is perfect? Most of us tittered when Bill Clinton claimed he smoked, but didn’t inhale. Perhaps it would have been better if he’d just said “mind your own business.”

The generation that helped win WWII was also the generation of the Organization Man. If the corporation said “move to LA” the answer wasn’t “but my whole family lives in Chicago.” It was “how soon to I need to be there.” The family scattered and the folks got too old or tired of shoveling snow and moved to Florida. We lost not only family ties but community ties.

We traded the Ma and Pa diner on Main Street for the McDonalds near the new freeway exit. We gave up the folks who knew our names for the harried sales help with name tags. We gave up the gal or guy behind the counter who knew just how we liked our coffee, that the eggs should be over easy and the hash browns extra crisp for fix your own coffee, eggs cooked to fit a biscuit and potato patties in greasy little baggies.

We traded the local shoe store where they knew your size and the clerk would probably tell everybody at the pub about your new pumps for do it yourself at Fred Meyer.

We traded the local hardware store and the guy behind the counter who probably helped you plan your new kitchen and would sell you three widgets if you needed them for plastic packaging with two more than you needed.

We traded the local meat market where the meat in the back was probably chewing grass in the next county  a couple of weeks ago and the butcher knew who was in the market for soup bones for CO2 treated meat in plastic packaging and E coli.

We traded the anticipation of the first local tomatoes of the summer for red “things” that look like tomatoes and taste like plastic.

There were three or four TV channels and we all watched Ed Sullivan or the Untouchables, or Laugh In. Folks knew which friends or relatives probably wouldn’t answer the phone when PBS ran the original Forsyte Saga back in the sixties. It was a community of sorts. New shows had at least half a season to find an audience, maybe even a season or two.

Now we have I don’t know how many channels and shows that don’t find an audience within the first couple of weeks simply disappear. They’re gone before I even know they’re there. I loved the X-Files. After I stumbled over it half way through the second season and eagerly looked forward to any reruns from season one so I could catch up.

We traded standing on the stool watching and “helping” mom make dinner for soccer moms, video games and little kids who have to have their moms figure out when they have time to play together.

We forgot, if we ever realized it, that businesses are in the business of selling “something.” The move towards preserved prepared foods had been slowly growing for over a century before WWII. And the first efforts at preserved foods were to supply the military, long distance shipping and the pioneer trade. There was a huge need during the war for food that could be prepared and preserved or shipped as mixes for military use.

After the war there was all these consumables needing consumers. We found ourselves with a new label. We were no longer customers we were consumers and Madison Avenue stepped up to the plate. The cake from the mix was “in” and do it yourself was out. Even if the home made cake tasted better. Somehow dinner in a can was trendier than what you cooked in your own pan at home. There was this new line in the national ledger. The consumer price index. And forty years later we found out that what we’d been consuming had more in common with the chemistry lab than the pantry just off the kitchen.

We woke up one day and discovered that the local shops where your custom (patronage) mattered were gone. We ended up with big box stores that advertise gift bags for the first five hundred customers who show up at 2 AM on Black Friday and are “shocked” when everybody stampedes through the door trying to be first. And happy as hell that the stampede made the regional cable news channel for a bit of free advertising. They ran it over and over and over.......

And the elected hired help has cooked the books so that only the finished products and the money used to buy them are counted in the national ledgers. Mom staying home and baking bread or cookies isn’t even a blip on the radar screen. Mom going out and working so she can buy bread and cookies for her family is part of the Gross National Product. Jerry was the guy downtown who sold hardware, not Jerry’s, the big box store across town that you can use for your daily walk.

I don’t want to go back to the days when we had to make everything ourselves, a bad harvest meant everybody in the neighborhood might go hungry, or it taking a week to get to Portland by horse and wagon. There has to be a balance between being a consumer and a customer. We aren’t going to be treated with respect or allowed any kind of dignity unless we demand it and work towards a day when the threat to take our“custom” someplace else means something.

You go girl. I'm not sure we have time to wait for the pendulem to swing back.

GUIDE TO CALORIE BURNING

What with the holiday season here and the politics crazier than ever we present the following.

Beating around the bush 75
Jumping to conclusions 100
Climbing the walls 150
Swallowing your pride 50
Passing the buck 25
Throwing your weight around (depends on weight) 50-300
Dragging your heels 100
Pushing your luck 250
Making mountains out of molehills 500
Hitting the nail on the head 50
Wading through paperwork 300
Bending over backwards 75
Jumping on the bandwagon 200
Balancing the books 25
Running around in circles 350
Eating crow 225
Tooting your own horn 25
Climbing the ladder of success 750
Pulling out the stops 75
Adding fuel to the fire 150
Wrapping it up at days end 25

From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Author unknown

PLEASE NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER REPOST

I've been rereading journal posts. Blasts from the past so to speak. Right now it's late November in eastern Oregon. We were living in Springfield back in 2008. November to January in the southern Willamette valley is foggy, chilly, damp, and gloomy. Who knows? Maybe the smoothie recipe was meant to cheer us up. All it did was give me the chills. 

"We take two newspapers and sometimes I wonder what universe some the special editors are hanging out in or what they’re sniffing. It must be some seriously good shit or a galaxy far, far away.

It’s morning (well, it’s not morning now, but it was when I read the paper) in western Oregon and it’s January. The temperature outside is about thirty degrees, give a take a couple. It’s dark. It’s foggy. We’ve barely seen the sun in days. And when it does come out we’re lucky if it hits fifty degrees in the afternoon. I feel like a mushroom. And what does the food section offer me as an alternative to my nice warm oatmeal with cinnamon, raisins and blueberries? A beautiful, icy, cold, fruit smoothie.

I’m still shivering. And hey, chucklehead. Do have any idea what frozen fruit goes for in the store? Yes we have frozen blueberries in our freezer. That’s where the berries in the cereal came from. They were delicious. Especially after they thawed out and warmed up. We grew them. If we hadn’t grown them we would have bought them last summer and froze them. Same for the blackberries, strawberries and raspberries. And I’m not wasting those precious Oregon berries in a blender. Sacrilege.

I’ll save the smoothie (good use for the culls) for August. For mid afternoon when it’s about sixty degrees warmer outside and the sun is shining."

SPIRIT MOUNTAINS

One of my favorite quotes from Carl Sagan. Sorry I can't remember which mountain range these peaks belong to. I suspect they might be in the Andes. The light is fantastic. Early morning? Almost sunset? Light through a gap in the clouds.

FLOWER ROOTS AND STONES

Take a drive up the coast on 101 and check out the basalt cliffs. If there is a little soil in a crack a bit of green can be seen. Drive east throught the gorge. Where there is a crack a bit of green will find a foothold. As the trees give way to scrub watch where the hills fold into each other. Any place the rain manages to trickle through. That's where you will find low shrubs, scrubby trees with delusions of grandeur.

Basalt is a strange rock. If it cools properly it forms six sided colums. And, as road builders have found to their dismay, rain and ice and roots do their work over time. Drive sections of 101 and the columns are sheathed in chicken wire. Helps to cut down on rock slides. Heck, drive Franklin Blvd. betwen Springfield and Eugene you will see the same thing. Chicken wire sheathing the basalt columns to try to prevent rock slides. Creation is slow and patient and we mess around at our peril. Or added expense in road upkeep, delays, and detours.

Looking at my Street Atlas. If 101 between Florence and Newport in Oregon is blocked by a slide there is a network of mainly county roads that will get you from here to there. They are twisty and not built for truck traffic. We are talking coast range here. It's a little better further north but we're still talking major detours when the main route is blocked. Man plans and Creation sits back and says "good luck with that folks."

THE FLOWER THAT SHATTERED THE STONE

The Earth is our mother just turning around
With the trees in the forest and roots underground
Our father above us whose sigh is the wind
Paint us a rainbow without any end

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Sparrows find freedom beholding the sun
In the infinite beauty we're all joined in one
I reach out before me and look to the sky
Did I hear someone whisper? Did something pass by?

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Words and Music by Joe Henry and John Jarvis

Or slowly turned it into gravel. 

Holy Days and Holy Ground

A product of reading Joe Campbell, Mary Renault (especially the Prose Singer and Mask of Apollo) and watchig Mythos of PBS. Among other sources

games but it wasn't the only one.

Greek philosophy described an ultimate God/dess who had more than one face. And some of the Gods had more than one face as well. Poseiden was the God of the sea, but he was also known as Earth Shaker. There were various versions of Apollo, Athena, or Artemis and they all had festivals. Many of them lasted several days. Dionysus was not only the patron of the vine but of actors and the theater.

Many of the festivals were times when plays might be presented as part of a contest, sometimes not. And, in theory, actors were under the God’s protection so they could travel from city to city even if those cities were at war with each other. Of course you might find as the actor in Mask of Apollo early in his career. You might get to your next stop only to find that the men were away fighting, the women and kids were barricaded at home and the occupying troops were bivouacked in the theater using the scenery for the cook fires. Whoops, guess we don’t get paid for that trip.

 There was a rich spiritual life that has been either dismissed or barely acknowledged because what became our way was the right way. Period, end of discussion.

What was accomplished by setting a specific day as holy, by breaking the links to a changeable calendar that was tied to sun and earth? It undermined the authority of the astronomer/priests. One of their responsibilities was to keep track of the coming of the full moon for certain festivals of the goddess. Also theykept track of the orbit of the sun to signal the passing of one season to the next and the solstices and equinoxes that were the midseason festivals.  

By undercutting the authority of the astronomer/ priests it helped to reinforce the authority of the Mosaic priesthood. And it isolated the followers of the Mosaic Law from their neighbors. No shared festivals. No ties of guest friendship that allowed people to travel from town to town and be sure of some sort of welcome even if your co religionists didn’t live there.

Under the old calendar any day could be a holy day for somebody. If one day is set aside as holy what does that make of the other six days of days of the week? If only one group within a society is labeled holy because they were born into that “tribe” where does that leave the rest of us? If God lives up on a “holy” mountain, is the rest of the earth not holy?

I don’t think so. I believe that holy ground is right outside my door. And I also believe that if we listen the way we should, any one of us can hear the Song.

A FEAST FIT FOR A SKELETON

I originally posted this entry back in 2006 when social media was really beginning to take off. If we were feasting on ourselves back when the author wrote his original piece imagine the banquet now.

Anger

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is probably the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations yet to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain your are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

This is from a book called Wishful Thinking-A Theological ABC. It’s a skinny little book with entries from Abraham to Zaccheus. I’d read it years ago and finally managed to track down a used copy a few years ago. This particular entry has always stuck with me.

The author's entry on bread reminds us that there is an emptiness that even the most elaborate feast won't satisfy. I think that the feast of anger that we're seeing around us is one of the results. Darned if I know what the answer is.

Blessed be

BLOOD MONEY

I mined these entries from 2012 as the country was running up to the November elections. We wonder how a president can turn his back as the violence escalates. The current occupant claims to be a business man and a man of business was running then. And you know what's kind of funny? I came across bishop Romero totally by accident. He had a tiny part in a biopic of John Paul II quoting another embattled bishop as it turns out.

Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse this headline greets your unbelieving eyes. MITT ROMNEY STARTED BAIN CAPITAL WITH MONEY TIED TO DEATH SQUADS.  Included in the list were the supporters Roberto D'Aubisson's ARENA party. D'Aubisson, trained at the school of the Americas at Fort Benning was finally tied to the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero. 

Goddess can it get any worse? Drove me to haul out my old Jackson Brown albums. This one is painfully appropriate. I want to take this sorry excuse for a human being, shake him until his teeth rattle and ask him what the hell he was thinking. 

SOLDIER OF PLENTY

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would
You try to take the slack
Stay awake and watch his back
But something happens every now and then
And someone breaks into the promised land
Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is long on hunger
This world is short on joy

A-e-i-o
You speak as if you know
What’s good for everyone
What’s good in what you’ve done?
What’s good about a world in which
War rages at a fever pitch
And people die for the little things
A little corn, a little beans

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

You measure peace with guns
Progress in mega-tons
Who's left when the war is won?
Soldier of misfortune--
Soldier of an angry call
Soldier on foreign soil
I’m not here to fight your war
I know what you're fighting for

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

I wonder if he can claim he retroactively returned their investments? 

El Salvador. Two words that make it impossible for me to vote for Mitt Romney even if I wanted to. By 1983 several priests, an archbishop and four American churchwomen (three nuns and a lay missionary) had been murdered.The sister's crime? Trying to get refugees out of the killing zones. Running a school and an orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the fighting? Our ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White was fired by the Reagan Administration for not towing the party line.

 In December 1981 the Atlacatl battalion, American trained at the school of the Americas, entered the village of El Mozote. By the time they left about three days later, the people of El Mozote and several surrounding smaller hamlets were dead. The youngest was eight months old. There was more violence to come before the decade was over, but all of this was known before Romney accepted the investments of the El Salvadoran oligarchs. Known, pretty much ignored, and just one of many involving American training and American arms. Mortor rounds came labeled made in the USA.

That Romney and Bain were willing to business with families that either contributed or stood by while these murders took place is more than I can stomach. There's an old saying. All that is needed for evil to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing.

MEDITATION

The Currrent Occupant has a new spiritual advisor. Near as I can tell she has no actual training in theology. Has run at least one church into bankruptcy and is currently being accused of running a ponzi scheme. Should fit right in.

Anyway I ran into this on my blog from a decade ago. I was looking for something else. And at a time when the lies are a penny a pound it kind of caught my attention,

Danger, curious person thinking in public.

For the sake of argument rewrite the story of the Fall in Genesis without the spiritual element and you find a story is as old as humanity. It’s repeated every time some guy tries to get a girl into his bedroom. It’s repeated every time a joint, a line of coke, even a cigarette is offered with the tired refrain of “everybody’s doing it,” “what’s the matter, you scared,” and the classic “nobody will every know.” There’s at least one problem with trying to keep a secret. No matter how deep you bury that secret at least one person will always know what happened. You can hide things from everyone but yourself. Buried deep inside it festers and creates a wall between you and everyone around you.

And if you believe that in some way the God of scripture set the forces of creation in motion that resulted in humanity and every other creature in the universe, including a certain tempter; there’s always “don’t tell Dad.” And there’s another old standby. Take out the King James sixteenth century language and you might find that the story takes on a five year olds’ playground singsong; “I know something you don’t know.”

Perhaps the death blamed on man’s fall in the garden wasn’t the physical death that the far right evangelicals claim. After all there’s no claim in scripture that our physical bodies were meant to be immortal. Even stars and planets are born, age and die. Something the writers who preserved scripture wouldn’t have, couldn’t have known.

Perhaps the meaning story isn’t death of the body but injury to the soul. When truth is ignored, trust is impossible and without trust there can never be love or hope. And without love or hope life is meaningless.

A PREPOSTEROUS SEVEN AND A HALF MINUTES

Back in the seventies NBC produced a miniseries title Jesus of Nazareth. Always been a favorite of mine. I have the DVD's but the film is also on Amazon Prime. And I love to read the reviews. Especially the one star ones. One really caught my attention titled "what were they thinking." Couldn't get past the first seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half minutes out of over six hours of film.

Well I couldn't resist. If you ignore the opening titles seven and a half minutes gets you through the betrothal of Mary and Joseph and just about to the point where a barking dog and a bright light wake her up. Looks pretty tame to me.

But the film opens in the synagogue. During services. Joseph has side curls. Could it be that everyone in that seven and a half minutes is a Jew? That Jesus was born to a Jew? Was raised as a Jew. Was bar mitzvahed? Etc. Etc. The awareness that Jesus wasn't a "Christian?" Didn't stick around long enough to find out that just about everyone in the film was a Jew. Even Herod Antipas. Probably wasn't a very observant one. Just glad he was still alive after dear old dad came to a very painful end.

And presented as one, hen pecked. He married his brother's wife while the brother was still alive. Two? he was a little too interested in his step daughter Salome. As interested as he could get in a seventies miniseries that had to make it past the censors.

All the disciples except Luke were Jews. Wasn't something that was really brought up even in my relatively liberal Methodist congregation while I was growing up. You sort of knew it but it JUST WASN'T MENTIONED. That almost everything that the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth taught came straight out of the Jewish prophets. That the difference was in who sent me. The prophets said "the Lord sent me." And most of them tried like heck to get out of the job. Jonah tried sailing away. Didn't help.

I left a comment. It was very tame along the lines of not much happened in the first few minutes what was so preposterous?

And you know, I don't believe it ever sank in so hard before.

YOU LIVE IN OREGON IF ACCORDING TO JEFF FOXWORTHY

This is actually a few years old but it is still funny. 

HERE IS WHAT JEFF FOXWORTHY HAS TO SAY ABOUT ‘LIVING IN OREGON’…

• If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve worn shorts, sandals, and a parka at the same time, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Oregon.
• If you measure distance in hours, you live in Oregon. Also Washington and almost any state west of the Mississippi. 
• If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Oregon.
• If you have switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ and back again in the same day, you live in Oregon.
• If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Oregon.
• If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Central, Southern or Eastern Oregon. Or you are driving 75 mph and the local smoky bear blasts past you. 
• If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over 2 layers of clothes or under a raincoat, you live in Oregon.
• If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow and ice, you live in Oregon.
• If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, you live in Oregon.
• If you feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more than 10 ways to order coffee, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more people who own boats than air conditioners, you live in Oregon.
• If you stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “Walk” signal, you live in Oregon.
• If you consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it is not a real mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Dutch Bros, you live in Oregon.
• If you know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon, you live in Oregon.
• If you know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Clatskanie, Issaquah, Oregon, Umpqua, Yakima and Willamette, you live in Oregon. Extra points if you know the first three cities are actually in Washington.
• 
  
• If you consider swimming an indoor sport, you live in Oregon.
• If you know that Boring is a city and not just a feeling, you live in Oregon.
• If you can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food, you live in Oregon.
• If you never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho, you live in Oregon.
• If you have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists, you live in Oregon.
• If you buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time, you live in Oregon.
• If you actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your OREGON friends, you live or have lived in Oregon.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

Robert Heaton was a Quaker and my great grandfather seven times removed. He sailed to the New World with his family aboard The Lamb in the fall of 1682. His branch of my family hailed from Yorkshire mostly. Dad's line, if accurate, can be traced to a gentleman with the given name of Adam Deheton born in the county of Lancaster sometime after 1100. And while Ancestry usually lists him with the Deheton surname he was probably Adam Fitz somebody. He died in Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire my ancestors remained, off and on, for five hundred years. Until Quaker Robert said the heck with this religious persecution bit and followed William Penn.

Five hundred years minus a couple of generations in the shire of Lincoln. Mostly around the same little town. Still exists. Name of Kirkheaton. In old English heah is a high place. Tun is a village. And kirk still means church in Scotland. The village in a high place built next to a church.

Five hundred years, give or take a few. That's twice as long as this country has been called the United States. Not look too united right now but, it does put things into perspective. Plague, the rebellion called the Pilgramage of Grace, the reformation, the English Civil War and finally exile. Must have hurt to leave so much behind. Hurt, it must have almost torn their hearts out. You had to have a damn good reason to uproot your whole family and cross the ocean.

I have mixed feelings about the possibility of running into great grandfather Robert in my spiritual journeyings. I can almost hear him. "We risked bad food, bad water and possible ship wreck. Others suffered typhus, scurvy and small pox. We came searching for religious freedom and to build a better life for ourselves and our families. And a fine mess you've made of it. Daughter we expected better of our children."

And if I did run into him, damned if I'd have an answer for him.

And I still don't have an answer for him.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I originally posted this a few years back Before tRump ended up in the White House. I've run across another poster. Basically says "Do unto others and let ME sort it out. God."

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE FROM A PAGAN POINT OF VIEW

All this manufactured hoo haw over insurance companies paying for birth control for women even if the outfit they’re working for is church affiliated, got me to thinking. Dangerous I know. And it is manufactured. If the editorial in the Register Guard is accurate over half the states in the country require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. So, gentlemen, please take your outrage elsewhere.

I wrote this a few years back. I believe it still works for today. I haven't gone anywhere. Just kind of blah I guess

Recently picked up a little volume on women in church history; Catholic church history so you know there is a bit of an inbuilt bias. The first is Prisca or Priscilla who worked with Paul. One of the early churches was in Ephesus, located in what is now Turkey. Ephesus was also the site of a major temple of Artemis with a well attended festival held every year. And every year the silver smiths did a land office business in little silver images of Artemis. Not content to mind their own souls, the church in Ephesus went after the pagans for their “obscene” images. The church, successfully minding other people’s business for nearly two thousand years.

Jump forward to the late fifth century. Newly converted to the Roman branch of the church by his wife Clotilde, Clovis of the Franks sets out to share the joys of his new faith with the people he rules; at the point of a sword. Here’s to you great great grand dad, four dozen or so times removed. You can choose your friends. All you can do with your ancestors is to try not the repeat their mistakes. Clovis was one of the original “my way or the highway” missionaries.

Surprising how many worshipers of the Old Gods chose the highway rather than convert, or kept as many of their old customs as they could for nearly a thousand years. No wonder the church made attending mass mandatory. At least many of the old ways did survive until they were caught between the hammer of the Reformation, the anvil of the Counter Reformation and the general you’re either with us or against us of European nation building. Even then, some folks on the fringes of Europe, the western highlands of Scotland and the western Isles, kept fragments alive well into the nineteenth century.

We don’t usually look at it from the pagan point of view, but I’m guessing that many of my unnamed and unknown pagan ancestors would have appreciated a little separation of church and state in their own time.

VITAMIN D OR MELANIN DEPRIVATION

When I was a kid my folks took the Reader's Digest condensed books. One volume contained My Life in Court by a lawyer named Louis Nizer. Once chapter detailed a libel suit by a writer named Quentin Reynolds against a virulant columnist named Westbrook Pegler. One of Pegler's claims was that Reynolds had lied about his time as a WWII correspondant in Egypt. Reynold's countered not only with testimony of fellow correspondants but medical records. He had been treated for sun poisoning. Reynolds was an Irish, freckled, red head who literally had to stay out of the sun for the sake of his health. Was never quite sure why until he met the army doctor who asked him where his parents were from in Ireland. I forget the name of the county but this is literally cloudy or foggy more than three hundred days a year. Hence the very fair skin.

This is a round about way to an idea. Most folks with fair skins come from northern Europe through  Central Europe,the Balkins, and northern Russia. Taking emigration into account. Theory. Caucasians are not superior because they have fair skin. They have fair skin to limited amounts of sun available during late fall, winter, and early spring a chance for their bodies to produce vitamin D. Not sure where the blond and red hair and blue eyes fit in this theory.

Of course it doesn't matter so much in an era of decent diet and kids not having to go into the factories or down the mines in the developed countries. Next time somebody claims his fair skin and blond hair make him or her superior to everyone else just remind him or her about vitamin D.

Studying evolution, geography and physical Anthropology just might allow some folks to come to this conclusion themselves. No wonder some Republicans believe that higher education isn't good for the country.

Reynolds won his libel suit and later wrote a pretty decent autobiography titled By Quentin Reynolds. The Internet Archive library has a copy last time I checked. Pegler's allegations covered more than the time in Egypt. Actually pretty nasty from a man who was once one of Reynold's friends.

THE GREAT TURTLE

At one time Mitch McCellan reminded me of a Victorian dowager who had just sucked  a lemon. A very big, very sour lemon. Lately reminds me of a turtle. A big old basking turtle trying to pretend he is a snappin turtle. Whatever. He has also acquired a couple of nicknames. Moscow Mitch because he has apparently accepted contributions from a Russian oligarch. At least one. Andhe  totally refuses to release the full Mueller Report. Heck, we paid for the damn thing we ought to have the right to read it. He also refuses do consider any actions to make our elections more secure from foreign interference. And has allowed the federal elections commision to basically go out of business becuase it does not have enough members to function.

Mitch doesn't like that nickname and wants us to stop. It isn't fair.  Maybe he would prefer Massacre Mitch. Picked that one up because he refuses any action on gun control. Nothing at all.

He has this power because he is the the Senate majority leader. This position was created in the 1920's. It is not in the constitution like the position of Speaker of the House. Near as I can tell the positions of majority/minority leaders were created as houseeping positions as more states were added and the senate became larger. And nowhere in the constitution is the power for him to block bills from being considered. This power may have been created over time to cater to the prejudices of individual members but it is not in the constitution.

Vote this turtle out. Send him back to Kentucky with his ill gotten gains and our disgust. Abolish the majority/minority leader positions, and require that all bills passed by one house be at least considered by the other house. If the bill is tabled requite a vote to do so. Don''t allow one or two members of congress to just block a bill the other house passed.

BREAD

Hello. Still knocking around, adjusting to another med that leaves me not confused, just kind of disconnected. The ideas get sort of stuck in a ball of cotton.

I'm a kind of "how did early individuals come up with an idea" kind of person. Bread. Who put together harvesting wild grains crushing or grinding the seeds or grains, adding water, and baking the results? If they started out just toasting the dough over coals who accidentally used a hot rock and discovered that bread without added charcoal tasted better.

The Nile valley has evidence of mortars and pestles used nearly seventeen thousand years ago. Probably used to grind barley and early forms of wheat.

The Egyptians may have invented the oven. Where did someone get the idea? Beats baking your dough on a hot rock. Records show evidence of thirty varieties of bread, usually some form of a round loaf. Bread even accompanied the dead into the afterlife. A tomb opened in 1936 had loaves over three thousand years old.

The Romans may have produced more than sixty varieties and bread was so basic the word was used to mean food of any kind.

Mosaic showing a Roman wood fired oven. Fire below, oven above. Some ovens use the fire in the oven and move the coals aside to bake. Usually have to turn the loaves to avoid overbaking or scorching.

For centuries you dipped pieces of bread into a common pot or used a chunk of bread as a plate and ate the "plate" afterwards. A loaf you could slice like we do now is relatively new. If you wanted thin bread you baked thin bread.

Bread still comes in all shapes. Flat, thin, round (with or without a hole in the middle) short, long. Made with wheat, rye, barley or other grains and seeds. Leavened or unleavened. And how did somebody discover yeasts in the first place?

Source The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones.

GREAT CANADIAN RIVERS

Discovered a series on Amazon Prime. Dating from the early 2,000's it's called Great Canadian Rivers. Covers three seasons and has film of over three dozen rivers. Big ones. Small ones. From the east coast to British Columbia. From the border with the United States to the Arctic. Fantastic video, out its the product of Canadian producers.

Different music for each film, which they have the good sense not to use ALL the time. But different for each episode. Good film of birds and wildlife. With plenty of birdsong. I just wish they had labels. I recognize some. Discovered the call of the bald eagle. And it it's not what you would expect. Sort of a crk, crk, crk. Interviews with First Nations tribes that lived on the land long before the Europeans showed up.

My only real complaint is that the episodes jump around the country. However a map is used to show where the river is. Some of the rivers are the great ones like the Columbia. Some are very small. All are beautiful. Some are small. All are wonderful. Some are largely unchanged. Some are threatened. All are precious to us.

 Worth a watch if you can find it. And reminds us how dependent many of those rivers depend on the glaciers and snows of the high mountain ranges.

CARL SAGAN AND THE PALE BLUE DOT

As the Voyager space craft left the orbit of Neptune the craft was turned towards the sun for last pictures of the planets. Just below the rings of Saturn is a pale blue dot. That is earth. What Carl Sagan said about our little dot in space then echoes even more strongly now. Our spaceship earth.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar. Every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagine self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity-in all this vastness- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and if I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known..  

FIFTY YEARS AGO

This week marked the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Al Jazeera English had an entry on FB. Which brought out the usual it's all a hoax crap. However many of them had Arabic sounding names. Some with enough flaws in English to suggest this was an actual real person.Also try this Wickipedia entry.

But you go on the page and there isn't much there. Somebody spending all their entries changing their profile pictures. Real person or a bot? Heaven knows there is a lively conspiracy industry claiming the lunar landings never happened. Along with flat earth, crisis actors at shootings, 9/11, and so on into inanity.

Read some of the goofy comments. And there it's no changing closed minds. But I watched those landings take place. There were monitoring stations all over the earth including Jodrell Bank observatory in England.

And there is reentry. The capsules landed within sight of an air craft carrier and their support ships. A C130 prop driven plane can get to 30,000 feet. Unloaded. I believe someone would have noticed the command module being dumped out the rear of b the plane. Total shrug here. Somebody who was part of the hoax filmed on a soundstage would have written a book by now and made a mint.

Funny

If we could harness all that energy. BTW. Even the Vatican has an official astronomer. Although he has to work at an observatory in Arizona these days. Less pollution and a lot less light.

CHUM IN THE WATER

In his latest Tweet Storm the current occupant has suggested that the four women of color in the house should go back where they came from and stop criticizing him and our f***ed I'll up immigration policies. Three of the ladies in question were born in the US and the fourth is a naturalized citizen.

Now like everyone with more than three brain cells to rub together I was more then a little pissed off. Today I got to thinking. We are being played like a cheap violin.

His used to be good buddy and fellow target in at least one lawsuit, Epstein, has been arrested and the decor in his mansion is disturbing. To say the least. Also his catalog of under age women. It seems more than a few of his long term associates are ducking for cover.

Mueller is due to testify under oath before the house. What better way knock those stories off the front page and off the popular searches then a good old fashioned racist, woman hating, Muslim bashing, patented Trump Twitter melt down. Only  one question? Did he come up with this on his own or was it the result of some carefully planted suggestions?

Whatever. It worked like a charm. The base is eating it up. Their messiah is sticking it to those uppity females again. The media is responding like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Crazy? Like a rabid hyena. A pack of them.

THE CRAB NEBULA

Image is a mosic from NASA and the European Space Agency. M1 Charles Messier's list. Known as the Crab Nebula, we now know it is the remnant of a super nova explosion. First seen in the eleventh century it is more than six thousand light years from earth. The spectrum shows oxygen and sulpher to be present and the blue glow is from the neutron star pulsar in the heart of the cloud.

The nebula can be found in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull. The cloud can be seen, sort of without the aid of a telescope. Shot can be found in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Glorious isn't it?

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER

I have posted this before. However in the rush to extract every last resource on the planet and the hell with the next generation it won't hurt to post it again. Comes from the seventies. The author was Willie Whytton. My favorite version was done by Ed Ames.

And yes this has something to do with astronomy as we rush to make the sky too thick with pollution to even see the stars. Or even have anyone left who cares to look at the stars. 

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER

I speak on behalf of the next generation.

Our sons and their daughters, their children to come.

What will we leave them for their recreation?

And oil slick? A pylon? An industrial slum?

Chorus:

Leave them a flower, some grass and a hedge row.

A hill and a valley. A view to the sea.

These things are not ours to destroy as we want to;

A gift given once for eternity.

We plunder. We pillage. We tear and we tunnel.

Trees lying toppled, they finger the sky.

Building a land for machines an computers.

In the name of progress, the farms have to die.

Chorus:

Fish in the ocean, polluted the poisoned.

The sand on our beaches all stinking and black.

We and our tankers and banks and investsments

They never worry, the birds will come back.

Chorus:

When the last flower has dropped its last petal.

Then the last concrete is finally laid.

The moon will shine cold in a nightmarish landscape.

Our gift to our children. The world that we made.

ISLAND IN THE SKY

NASA has an archive of pictures taken, one per day, of objects in the sky ranging from stars, galaxies, comets. sunsets and storm cells. This is the galaxy known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda.

The M is for Charles Messier, a French astronomer whose primary goal was discovering comets. Along the way he spoted other objects that looked like they might be comets but didn't act like comets. Basically what could be seen either by the naked eye or with the telescopes available at the time. It wasn't until years, if not decades, later that we realized that many of these objects were not in our home galaxy. This shot is composed of a mosaic of shots taken over a ninety hour period.

Approximately two million light years away astronomers believe our Milky Way looks much like M31.

CRUCIFY HIM AGAIN

The image of the cop is, I believe, taken from a shot of a Jewish demonstrator arrested outside one of the detention center. 

My title is deliberate. Not only is the detainee not white, doesn't speak English, says he's a carpenter, he is from the Middle East. Obviously a trouble maker, might even be a terrorist. Spotted the image in another blog. I'll get back to the astronomy. Eventually. Seems taking the blog up again took a right turn. Or something. 

In the film Romero, a bio of archbishop Romero, father Rutilio Grande jokes that if the army or police confiscated a Bible all that would be left when you got it back was the cover. He was murdered a little later. A murder that may have started the archbishop on the road to his own martyrdom and sainthood. His people called their monsenor a saint long before the vatican did. 

JFK

Hac a hard time coming up with a title for this one. Lost dreams? Bullets and dreams? Took me back to 1963. 1968 was a bitch of a year too. 

Found this on the web. Damnit Jack you died too damn soon. We are so far from the dream right now. This not the country I thought I thought I was working to build when I got out of high school. Five years after that fatal day in Dallas.