PART 2 OF ?

December of 2016 and I was into I believe the fifth or sixth bout with cellulitis. With something else going on. An area of discoloration near the cellulitis blisters that would drain. Primary saw it. Wound Center got involved with the last bout. I was going to the doctor at each attack. Taking my meds. My test numbers for the warfarin never really settled down but they were in the accepted range.

After the last attack the doctor at the wound center decided to debride the the affected areas. Still don't really know the why of the discolored areas just that by the time it got to the surface the damage was done. OK debridement was done. Primary checked the results. I went into the wound center to have it checked. That day was a bummer. Breathing was hard. Got home. Discovered some petacchia on  my abdomen. Checked an hour later and there were more. Decided the hell with this and called 911. Went to MKW first. They were full. Sent me to Riverbend.

I was admitted and things get a little fuzzy. I think it was the second morning. Therapy tried to get me up. Right ankle was too sore to stand and I felt like crap anyway. After that? I remember some really weird dreams. Then I woke up. Flat on my back. In a different room with a tube  down my throat. It took a little doing but I finally got someone's attention. Finally got rid of the tube and the staff started bringing me up to date. I didn't find out until later that I had had four surgeries, I'd been out for ten days.

And really, truly I don't know how many installments this will take because heck, I still have a life and I can only take so much of this at one time. So be patient. Please.

I WON'T BE TALKING POLITICS

with my brother in law any time soon. I don't know him well enough to know  where he gets his news.  But, I was informed that the Vegas shooter  killed several security guards before opening fire. He didn't. The one guard who was wounded survived. He did alert the cops, helped evacuate the floor and gave them as much information as he could before being treated for the leg wound he received when the gunman fired through the door. Hitting him in the leg.

And that the shooter was targeting Christians or conservatives or Republicans or any or all of the above. Presumably because only Christians, conservatives, Republicans or supporters of the current occupant go to country music festivals. In Las Vegas. I mean it's not like we have our political or religious affiliations tattooed on our foreheads.

We can't ask the shooter. He's dead. Could it be that he was another nutcase with access to a lot of fire power and a handy crowd? That he didn't much care WHO he shot? I did find out that my nephew's sister in law was there. The person in front of her was shot down and she damn near got trampled in the stampede for cover. She did make it out on the first available flight.

I do know that the NRA pretends to speak for a membership that numbers in a small fraction of the population of this country. I do know that most of their funding comes from the corporations that make the guns not the people who own the guns. And while a majority of our supposed representatives would rather walk over hot coals than opposed the NRA it wouldn't help if we had legislatures composed of saints.

There are so many guns in this country that we would have to shred the constitution to get MOST of them off the streets. And think about it. African Americans aren't responsible for most of the mass shootings. Hispanic Americans? For the most part no. Asian Americans? Nope. And so on down the road. A few by followers of radical Islam. And almost no women from any ethnic group.

So. What do we do about the white males from almost any age group from early twenties to almost senior citizens? The tiny, tiny minority of white males?  Bless me if I know the answer. I wish I did.

DON'T FEEL SORRY FOR ME

OK. Here goes nothing. This may take more than one post.Probably will or this will look like war and peace. And it's going to stir up some demons.

Last year was a bitch. I ended up in the hospital and rehab. Twice. First time for breathing and other problems and they discovered some clots in my lungs and I was put on warfarin. That MAY have been the beginning of the rest of the story. Home for a few weeks. Mild problem with fleas because frankly once your cats know what's coming....developed a weird set of I'm not sure what they were frankly. Some sort of blisters on the feet and ankles. Back in good ol' MKW and then rehab for dressing changes. And some really good meds.

Finally home again. And I won't go into those details in public. Developed a fast moving case of cellulitis and back in I went again for IV antibiotics. Home again. Home again. But I wasn't dancing a jig. And if you want my opinion of the wound care outfit working at MKW message me privately on FB.

Got hooked up with a good primary care guy. And I'm guessing that nobody saw what was coming because they'd never seen it before. Leave it to me to be "original." And the cycle began. I'd get over one bout of cellulitis and start all over in a few weeks. My breathing never really came back. I went to the doctor. Took my meds. Clotting levels never really settled down.

At that point mom was ninety and starting to really slow down. We kept doing our thing. Somehow. Roberta came over when she could. Got through Christmas and New Years.

THE SOUL OF A RIVER AND MORE

I originally posted this back in 2014. The almost ignored leak from the Keystone Pipeline, officially just over 200,000 gallons and probably much more, prompted this repost. That crude doesn't just sit on the surface. Especially on ground with a high water table. The soul of Mother Gaia is at stake not just the river. 

A few years ago I invested in the 1990’s Cousteau River Journeys DVD’s. Four of the episodes followed the Danube from headwaters to the Black Sea, with emphasis on the environmental degradation along the river in the former Soviet states. Chemical plants that dumped untreated waste into the river. The dangers of aging nuclear plants that weren’t that well built in the first place. Run off from contaminated ground water along with gas leakage into the atmosphere. Local economies based on fishing and farming were stressed out by the pollution.

The diversion of the river into man made channels to improve navigation, while destroying local economies based on the wetlands and marshes.

So, where is the soul of a river? Is it just the river? Or does the river and its soul stretch beyond the channel and the meandering blue line on a map.

The river is the ocean that gives up its moisture to the rains and snows.

The river is winter ice and summer sun.

The river is snow, rain and hail.

The river is the tiny veins and capillaries of water that stretch beyond the banks and below the river bed.  Searching, seeking, seeping into the deep rocks and the deep roots of the mountains. Finally finding the way to new streams and new tree roots. Coming into the sun again, pulled into the sky a thousand miles from where the rain last fell.

The river is the mountains, home to the springs a rivulets that join to form a torrent.

The river is the animals that depend on it for water and forage, the trees that shade the banks and shelter the birds.

The river is the disappearing marshes and the migratory birds that nested in the reeds.

The canals are the river and so are the drying wetlands that used to hold back the floods.

The dams we build are the river and so are the fish blocked from their native spawning grounds.

The river is the disappearing, sick and mutated fish and the villagers and fishermen who depend on them not only for their livelihood, but for tonight’s dinner.

The river is the untreated chemical waste that leaches into ground water. It’s the sewage from overburdened, aging city systems.

The river is the rain falling through air contaminated with radiation from nuclear plants that couldn’t be built to withstand every possible risk.

The river is us.

The last episode ends with a group of children including one of Cousteau’s grandchildren flying kites along the river bank to remind us that they will have to live in the world we are creating.

(Words fail me sometimes. I have the vision in my mind but can’t find the words to express what I see)

NOT FOR A LONG TIME YET

When the time comes. And it will come sooner or later. Say this in my memory.

DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there I do not sleep,

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sunlight on the ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning hush,

I am the soft uplifting rush

of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.

I am not there,

I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Fry 1932

And don't be too surprised if you catch me out of the corner of your eye. I'll be the one smiling like the Cheshire Cat. 

STILL MAKES ME_______ FILL IN THE BLANK

I posted this several years ago when I was going through my "you've got to be kidding, wait until you really face persecution" phase. I'm a few years older. The fundies still have a persecution complex.

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From Benjamin Corey’s blog about so called persecution of Christians in this country. 

"Ken Ham referenced an Atlanta Fire Chief who wrote a book condemning homosexuality etc. Up front he has the right to write the book. He has the right to use it in his Bible study class. He didn’t have the right to bring copies of his self published tome to the fire house and try to distribute them to his subordinates. He didn’t lose his job because he was a Christian. He lost it, in part, because he was using his position to in effect intimidate those under him. This is the comment that set off my post.

That firefighter has a duty to preach the Gospel of Christ. What he did was not wrong in any sense, him being fired is just another example of what a godless, pagan culture we live in .

Christians have been persecuted since Christ ascended to heaven. We will not stop being laughed at and mocked at until Christ returns." My old post below. 

Guess what. If you insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old. That the earth is the center of the universe and that the Bible is a science text book don’t be surprised if the most polite reactions are snickers behind the hands followed by quick exits and hysterical laughter from the other side of the door. That’s not persecution. It’s pity. Especially for any kids you may be “home schooling.”

Now on to the subject at hand. He did not have duty to preach the gospel on the taxpayers dime in a public building supported with the taxes of every citizen of the city to his subordinates. He can preach all he wants, hire a hall, stand on a street corner, build his own church. Nobody is going to stop him. Probably won't even throw ripe tomatoes at him.

To those who cry persecution when what is really happening is that you are finally being treated like everybody else.

I assume your pastor is still walking free. Hasn’t been arrested. Hasn’t suddenly disappeared. Hasn’t been gunned down in a local cane field. Update. Happened to a Jesuit priest named Rutilio Grande back in the late seventies in El Salvador. Big mistake. Also murdered were an old man and a boy who had the bad luck to be with father Grande when his car was riddled with gunfire.

Helped turn a nice, quiet, devout, hardly ever said a hard word, newly minted
 archbishop named Oscar Romero into a passionate voice for the poor and truly persecuted. Three years later in the spring of 1980 the death squads added the bishop to a death toll that doesn't have an official total. Could be as high as 80,000 in a country that had about five million people. And I don't believe that anyone has ever totaled the number peasants who were forced to flee the country and ended up in refugee camps in Honduras. 

Back to the original post

Anybody try to stop you from going to church. Any troops or cops blocking the entrance to the parking lot on Sunday morning. If you hold a Bible study at home are there any unmarked cars parked across the street watching who is coming and going? Any soldiers show up and turn your church into a barracks. Can a Catholic lay church worker make a delivery of consecrated Hosts to a small rural church without fear of being searched and murdered by the local death squads? Guatalamala.

 Ever see any graffiti on the walls that reads along the lines of “be a patriot, kill a priest? El Salvador. 

Has any congregation in this country ever been told at the end of funeral as mourners in Latin America attending a mass for murdered student activists were told, “stay inside the cathedral because the troops are outside and there's nowhere to run?”

Forgive me, I don't remember off hand where this happened. I THINK it was Argentina but I’m not going to bet the farm on it. The priests and other celebrants proceeded to go outside and begin walking towards the soldiers. Miraculously (I guess miracles do happen sometimes) the soldiers fell back and kept falling back until enough space in front of the cathedral had been cleared so that those inside had a fighting chance of getting down an alley or a side street. All of these things happened in Central and South America during the Reagan and Bush I years. And worse.

Oh, and BTW can your church have a cross outside or on the roof without the government (China) telling you to take it down? Or worse bulldoze the whole building. Or arrest you for belonging to a congregation that isn’t sanctioned by the state? Give me a freakin' break.

Here’s some icing for that cake. Has the Christian population of this country fallen by seventy five percent since say, 2003? This is happening in Iraq right now. In part, thanks to our “Crusade” and experiment in regime change. There were nearly a million Christians in Iraq when the war started. The number is closer to a quarter million and some of them are still there just because they haven’t had a chance to leave yet. There have been Christians in that part of the world since the beginning. Some of them still speak Aramaic. 

Since then the total has fallen even lower. 

So much for the trip down memory lane. 

THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?

I've said this before. I may be back. And someday I'll go into the gory details of the past few months. But not right now.

It's public record that disgraced judge and senator wanna be Roy Moore belongs to an evangelical Baptist Church. Checking out his Wickipedia site I learned that he was born in Alabama but the family moved around a lot.

What it doesn't say is whether he was raised in a certain branch of conservative evangelicalism or not. If he was, then his church helped shape his apparent belief that teenage girls are appropriate sexual partners. Or, as I suspect, he found a church "home" that fitted beliefs he already had. Either way he's way out of step with most of us. And so is his church in my opinion. Most of us don't see underage teenage girls as sexual partners. And you can go to prison if you act on that belief.

And, in a strange way,  he's way out of step with even the church. He didn't get permission from the families of the women who were teens at the time and are accusing him years later, and it was outside marriage. Watching so called pastors twisting in the wind trying to deal with questions about this sicko without coming down on either side of the fence would be funny if it wasn't so damn sad.

Read the commentary above since we're getting the usual "why didn't they say something at the time" crap. Talk about victim shaming.

And I suspect that at least some of these churches preach the even creepier practice of so called Purity Balls where fathers take their daughters out for the evening. Yuck IMHO.

IN POOR TASTE

My cousin reacted to this picture. I really don't want to give this website any more publicity than it's already getting. I do believe they're a bit cheeky using a quote from JFK in their header. After all, Kennedy not only had far more political experience than the current occupant but served in the navy during WWII. A man who challenged us to do our best not figure out how to do our worst.

Time to dig out my copy of Good Night and Good Luck. I'm not always a big fan of Michael Moore. I recognize everyone except the gal next to George Clooney. Some one who has spent a lot more of his own money trying to do some good than You Know Who ever will.

I was going to say to whoever wasted their time creating this, who the hell cares. Then I remembered that they just might think that Ted Nugent was the best thing since sliced white bread and that Glenn Beck was right up there with Saint Who Ever.

WHY?

My posting record this year has been spotty. At best. A lot of reasons. Some good. Some what the hell. I'll go into that later.

A couple of days ago a blithering idiot of a teenage did something incredibly, frankly unforgivably stupid. The and his friends were hiking in the Eagle Creek Gorge area along the Columbia River. A very wet, cool spring has been followed by a hot, dry summer. Another hiker was watching when this kid tossed what looked like a smoke bomb into the gorge. She went a little further, looked back an saw smoke coming through the trees. She shouted at everyone she could see ans headed back warning everyone she saw to turn back. 

The fire grew to about thirty five hundred acres. Over Monday night the fire exploded to forty eight hundred and authorities closed the freeway, I84, between Troutdale and Hood River. By today the Eagle Creek fire and joined the Indian Creek fire and we're looking at twenty thousand acres and growing.  

The gorge has several waterfalls, one of the most beautiful is Multnomah Falls.

Not the greatest picture. And there is a lodge, built in the twenties and quite beautiful. But this was the scene last night.

They did save the lodge. It might be a good idea to replace the roof with tiles. Not quite the twenties style of construction, but fire resistant. 

What is going on here? One witness reported that the kids were giggling. That they apparently didn't realize or care what the results were. Is it video games? If the game isn't going right you can just hit just start over. Life doesn't come with a do over. Is it that too many of us live in cities and aren't exposed to anything that isn't covered in asphalt? That there aren't consequences? CEO's run a corporation into the ground and still get a bonus? A candidate can be file for bankruptcy four times. Start businesses not pay attention and have them fail? Sexually abuse and boast about it. Tell the world that you could shoot someone and your followers won't care. And so on? 

Fire is a part of the natural world. Some trees and landscapes need fire to grow. And you grieve but you know it will regrow. But, to have a fool cause the destruction of something won't grow back for centuries? That brings you close to despair. 

NEVER FORGET

1968. I grew up in a little logging town in the foot hills of the Oregon Cascades. We had a pretty decent high school. It was 1968 and something happened that probably couldn't be repeated in a lot schools today. I'd like to believe it could but, we were a lot closer to the time when these horrors happened and there were a lot more veterans still alive who saw these events with their own eyes.

We had a new social studies teacher and bless me if I can remember his name. He had done his stint in the army and had access to certain film archives. Movies that were taken in the liberated concentration camps of the Reich. I don't remember the film may have included footage taken by the Germans. I have to hand it to them. They kept really good records.

I watched a documentary a few years ago that included footage of a book used to record the deaths of prisoners who actually ended up in the camps and weren't sent to the gas chambers right off the train.It was crazy. Such and such a date. Such and such a time. 12 PM to1 PM everybody died of pneumonia. Next hour everybody died of typhus. It was crazy. The men taking the films and filling out the records probably never realized where those films would end up. After all the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years. It lasted for twelve.

US history was a junior year class. Seniors who happened to have study halls during the same periods were allowed to watch too. I don't even remember if we had to have permission slips.

I went. I watched. I will NEVER FORGET.

To those participants in the demonstrations in Virginia last week. You know, the "men" with the torches, the shouts, the guns who are now trying to claim that they aren't really Nazis. They aren't really white supremacists. They aren't really, I don't know. Fill in the blanks with whatever you believe to be appropriate. They were there out of curiosity or some damn thing. You were there. We heard the shouts. We saw the twisted faces. We saw the torches that echoed the parades of the Brownshirts over eighty years ago.

Either have the guts to own up to it or stay under your rocks next time.

THE BALONEY DETECTION KIT

The late,, great Carl Sagan came up with this list of tools to use to try to separate truth from idiocy. Too bad there isn't another term to use. Real baloney (the lunch meat) has it's uses. 

The Baloney Detection Kit

Apart from pointing out these common fallacies, Sagan makes a few suggestions about the "tools" a skeptic should keep ready in their Baloney Detection Kit. These are not merely measures to identify bad arguments, but constructive ideas about how to come up with better alternatives:

• Seek independent confirmation of alleged facts.
• Encourage an open debate about the issue and the available evidence.
• "In science, there are no authorities. At most, there are experts."
• Come up with a variety of competing hypotheses explaining a given outcome. Considering many different explanations will lower the risk of confirmation bias.
• Don't get too attached to your own ideas, lest you get reluctant to reject them even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
• Quantify whenever possible, allowing for easier comparisons between hypotheses' relative explanatory power.
• Every step in an argument must be logically sound; a single weak link can doom the entire chain.
• When the evidence is inconclusive, use Occam's Razor to discriminate between hypotheses.
• Pay attention to falsifiability. Science does not concern itself with unfalsifiable propositions.

HER NAME WAS EDITH

This post was prompted by this article  and I will tell what I know of her story as often as I can.

This is about a great aunt I never knew. We were doing the Memorial Day flower round when I noticed a very small grave marker near other family graves. I guess it caught my eye because her name was the same as my grandma Parks. Edith. Checking out the dates on the marker was obvious that she died way too soon. It didn't take long for mom to tell me what she knew of her story.

Edith Freeman was her married name. Mom didn't remember her family name. If she ever knew it. And isn't that a kick. Try tracing the maternal sides of your family tree and like as not you'll keep running into brick walls.

She and my not so great uncle lived in a tiny little town in the foot hills of the Oregon Cascades. The nearest town with a hospital was over an hour away over a gravel road. As mom remembers it there was one family in town with a car.

 It was during the depression. They were dirt poor. She already had three small children and I'd be surprised to find out that the oldest was already in primary school. I don't know what she used but she tried to end her pregnancy herself. The owner of that only car tried to get her to that hospital. She never made it. She bled to death.. I'll repeat that.SHE BLED TO DEATH. She died in a car on a gravel road with only the driver for company.

That's her story. What I know of it. I'm guessing that there are a lot of stories just like hers. Her name was Edith and I will keep telling her story whenever and wherever I can.

INTENDED CONSEQUENSES

Or how to use fear and prejudice to make a profit;

Ran across the term BLOCKBUSTER today under the subject of housing segregation in the Los Angeles area in the forties thru the sixties.

Realtors would target a block or part of a neighborhood buy a piece of property and then resell or rent to a minority family. Often African American. Then wait for prejudice to take its course; make offers to buy at the lowest price possible. Then turn around and resell the property minority families looking for a piece of the American Dream. At a much higher price of course.

Of course this couldn't work in neighborhoods that had restrictive covenants in the purchase contracts. But it did work often enough to make the practice very, very profitable.

Ah, good old American Free Enterprise. Gotta love it. NOT.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES PART ONE

Sorry for the weird spacing. This started as post of FB that got too long.

Now that I have more than three brain cells firing at the same time it might be time to revive this tired,old blog. The title would be "The the Law of Unintended Consequences.

With no overseas competition corporate America exploded after WWII. Between the bottled up consumerism in the US and the need to rebuild a shattered Europe those were the Golden Years for American business. It will never come again.

Business expanded. Corporations asked their execs to move to California or Seattle or Houston or Atlanta leaving their extended families behind. The older generation said to hell with the frozen winters of Wisconsin and New York and moved to Florida. Fortunes were made in real estate and construction. The old neighborhoods withered. Those who couldn't afford to move or compete for the new jobs got left behind.

Farmers sold their fields. The first out went because they wanted to. Many of the others sold up because it became too expensive to grow potatoes as land values and taxes skyrocketed Those fields sported a new crop. Houses instead of potatoes. Just houses. No stores. None of the other businesses that crowded the streets of the Bronx or Queens. And many of those went out of business when the customers who could afford to got the heck out of Dodge.

We passed laws making it possible for minority groups to live anywhere they could afford to live. Those new subdivisions for example. Those that could got the hell out of their segregated neighborhoods. Taking the doctors, the lawyers, the business leaders; the human infrastructure needed to keep cities and neighborhoods alive.

Who was left behind? The people who couldn't afford to move because they were too old, too poor, unskilled.