16 May 2012 Sashimi at sundown

          The alarm clock does not call me to manage an IV infusion.  We hope, most sincerely, that this round of medication has been effective.  Instead, 0500 announced that I was required to roll out and get into town for my semi-annual primary care visit.  So, I reset the alarm for another 12 minutes, burrowed back in, and then, allowed my personal guilt to force me into getting up and facing the day.  So much for grabbing an extra bit of sleep.

          I found some sashimi-grade tuna at the grocery store.  We’ll dine on sashimi, salad, and strawberries tonight.  The berry season is nearly over.  Then it will be a short wait until local corn is available.  

          Allergies are troubling this year.  I could buy OTC meds but they all dry my eyes to the point where I’m looking at the world through an overlay of old gas station maps.  I now look forward to the first hard frost of the year. 

          At the doctor’s office, I brought up the tremor and shaking that I’m finding more and more troubling.  It began around the same time as a medication change took place.  It was decided that we (read that as “I” would change to a combination statin to see if the symptoms changed for the  better, for the worse, or did not change. 

          Now I need to slice the sashimi, avoiding bits of me.    

15 May 2012 Corker already trying to cover up financial piracy

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/news/economy/jp-morgan-congress/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

            “WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Congress will weigh in on the news that JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion on complex trades intended to hedge against economic risk, and that the losses could mount.

            “The Senate Banking Committee on Monday announced future oversight hearings, including one that will look into the trading losses at JPMorgan Chase from a regulatory angle. Lawmakers plan to question regulators, not JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) officials.

            “Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was the first to call for a hearing on Friday.

"Clearly the losses posted by JPMorgan are significant, and as policy makers we should understand in detail what has transpired," Corker said in a letter to Banking Committee chairman Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat.”

http://us.cnn.com/2012/05/14/opinion/black-jpmorgan-banks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

“Why JPMorgan gets away with bad bets

By William K. Black, Special to CNN

updated 5:39 AM EDT, Tue May 15, 2012

“Editor's note: William K. Black is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former senior financial regulator and a white-collar criminologist, he is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One."

            “(CNN) -- JPMorgan Chase can be considered a systemically dangerous institution, which means that it is "too big to fail" because the government fears that its collapse would cause a global financial crisis.

It is simply irrational to allow such an institution to exist, especially when it can easily incur a $2 billion trading loss… “

Cassi Creek: 

          I saw Bob Corker being interviewed on CNN this morning.  Senator Corker was spreading a layer of BS that would fertilize 40 acres of corporate farmland.  His contention is that no one understands the financial maneuvers in question, so the Congress should hold another round of hearings until they do understand them.  He further stated that he doubts anything illegal took place and that no regulations should be applied to the banking industry and its billionaire CEOs. 

          The last round of attempts at banking and financial regulation, designed to stop such misdealing and borderline-illegal machinations, were first gutted and then blocked from implementation by the teavangelists. 

          Corker knows who pays for his campaign (and a lot of his exalted position in life.  Like a good little toady, he was out trying to raise the public’s level of confusion about the pirates of Wall Street.  He needs to be voted out of office.  He’s had sufficient opportunity to feather his nest with materials plucked from the savings and salaries of the former middle class.

          The very able and viciously insightful political cartoonists have been hard at work pointing out the failure of Congress to provide sufficient regulation and oversight to prevent the same group of thieves and pirates who brought about the last recession from causing yet another one that may well be more devastating to the world’s economy than their last masterpiece.

14 May 2012 Film at 2300

          We have a crowed schedule this week.   Sleep will lose out to all other concerns.  Every item on the calendar requires getting up at 0 Dark: 30

          I’m going to try for a nap this afternoon.  Rare event for me. 

          Choose your own film and watch it at your convenience.

13 May 2012 And a side of Tzadzki

Cassi Creek:

          I’ve defrosted two lamb chops for dinner tonight.  These are from a local farm and have a bit more fat on them than I would consider acceptable if I were paying grocery store prices.  They beg an introduction to charcoal after some judicious trimming and seasoning.    The weather, windy with intermittent rain, suggests that unless I wish to serve cold and fat-laden lamb, it would be wise to cook indoors this evening. 

          I challenged the weather forecast yesterday in order to grill blue cheese burgers and fresh corn for dinner.  I won, barely.  I doubt that I would be as lucky today.

          We’re still in thrall to the IV meds schedule. By the time the morning dose in infused it is too late to crawl back into bed.  The afternoon dose leaves time for a nap but that time is best used to prep and cook dinner.  The night dose leaves no time for anything but trying to stay awake long enough to go to sleep.  However, we are fortunate that we can handle the medication.  It would be quite a lot worse if we had to take Gloria in for outpatient infusions on the same schedule.

          Enough elemental bitching.  Dinner beckons.

 

           

12 May 2012 In the days of nose art

http://us.cnn.com/2012/05/11/world/british-wwii-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

“(CNN) -- As German Gen. Erwin Rommel chased British forces across the North African desert, a stray Royal Air Force fighter crashed in the blistering sands of the Egyptian Sahara on June 28, 1942. The pilot was never heard from again. The damaged Kittyhawk P-40 -- a couple of hundred miles from civilization -- was presumed lost forever.”

            “Until now!”

Cassi Creek:    There is a slide show attached to this article.  It is well worth the time required to view it and will tell you a great deal about the skill and abilities of the pilot.  Landing a warplane in desert sands without destroying the aircraft is no mean feat.  Yet, the article indicates he became confused and failed to follow his flight plan, which caused him to run out of fuel.  The big, three-bladed propeller demonstrates the forces involved in the final landing. 

            The Curtis P-40 KittyHawk was a signature airplane of WWII.  It was already becoming eclipsed by newer and more powerful airframes but saw service in all the theaters of WWII.  A moderately lengthy article about the history of the plane can be found at

            http://www.chuckhawks.com/p40.htm.

These planes, if embellished beyond unit and service markings, often had shark jaw painted on the nose.  I’m curious as to how this one was painted.

            Nose art was very common on allied aircraft during WWII.  http://www.nose-art.net/index.html  The paintings made aircraft more easily identifiable in combat, and were morale boosters in a war where most people served for the duration of the war.  The names of planes and the images used often were selected by the individual aircrew commander/pilot.  From the nose art, you might learn all manner of things about the pilot and crew. 

Notice the pin-up quality image, the crew’s names and rank, and each bombing mission they flew denoted by a yellow bomb painted on the aircraft. 

            Nose art endured through the Korean War but was far less common in VietNam.  Changing aspects of how war was carried out, layers of secrecy to prevent aircraft being identified for propaganda purposes and to prevent the North Vietnamese learning when air strikes were to take place, and the beginnings of political correctness applied to warfare were all factors in the demise of the traditions of nose art.

            I wonder what images this latest flier carried on his plane, if any. 

11 May 2012 Once Upon An Enlightenment

Cassi Creek:  Over the last century, America has dabbled in establishing progressive forms of government.  We have elected leaders who understood the need for a social contract that provided safety nets for the poor and working class.  We have provided a free public education, public health networks, and unemployment and retirement insurance programs.  We did this while fighting two world wars, Vietnam, and the Cold War.  We did this while absorbing huge numbers of legal immigrants who came here wanting to become Americans. We did this while surviving a worldwide depression, a drought of legendary size and duration.  In addition, we did it while trying to overcome religious intolerance, racial bigotry, and cultural changes that broadened our acceptance of multiple minorities. 

          However, the need to discriminate lingers on in our population.  We find ways to exclude minorities from the full rights of citizenship.  We’ve allowed religious demagogues to fan the fires of intolerance, while weakening those progressive laws and regulations, which were always intended to strengthen the social contract.  The GOP/teavangelists have used their base’s collective disdain for and growing lack of education beyond 8^th grade to demand that Congress pass a series of laws designed to formalize discrimination and bigotry in a manner that denies the former promise of America, the core of equal opportunity, that was the American dream.

To make matters even worse, the states which comprised the Confederacy during our Civil War, in concert with other states that preserve those same social, cultural, and political disgraces, have mounted campaigns to force the passage of similar laws, drafted and funded by corporate sponsors and churches, so that a stacked, and highly reactionary Supreme Court will ultimately find and rule for the return to pre-revolutionary conditions. 

          We are likely to replace the office of Attorney General with a Grand Inquisitor.  The purity tests are already being applied to GOP/teavangelist candidates during the 2012 elections. Can burning at the cross for heresy be far behind?

Shabbat Shalom!

10 May 2012 The answers I have yet to hear

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/no-celebration-for-this-lesbian/2012/05/10/gIQAlPxfFU_blog.html

Posted at 10:59 AM ET, 05/10/2012

No celebration for this lesbian

By Lauren Taylor

I’m a progressive, out lesbian, but I’m not doing a happy dance about President Obama’s support for gay marriage.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think we (the country, the society) should be giving rights, privileges and protections to anyone — gay, straight, bisexual or other — based on their sexual or romantic relationships. I think most of the rights and privileges gay men and lesbians are seeking by pursuing marriage rights should be granted to human beings because they are human beings, whether or not they find one person they want to spend the rest of their lives with.

Cassi Creek:  When I wind up indicating that I support gays, lesbians, and other minorities in their quest for the right to marry, it is certain that someone will proclaim that such action will, somehow, damage or de-sanctify marriage between two heterosexuals.  Generally they use “man and woman (or man and wife) depending upon their placement on the fundamentalism scale. 

          This always causes me to wonder what it is about such a coupling that harms what is felt to be a “traditional pairing.  No one in the opposing camp has ever offered me a rational and/or valid answer.  If pushed hard enough the religious far-rightist will sputter a bit, then hide behind a line or two in Leviticus, insisting that “God” wants it that way.  Convenient, and unproven; the supposed words of Moses, purportedly speaking for the mythical deity he encountered in a flaming shrub, are invoked as if such invocation is supposed to overturn reason, rationality, science (many disciplines) and automatically win any and all arguments. 

          I don’t accept the premise of biblical or papal infallibility.  I don’t believe that any religion’s sacred text is accurate in translation or free from political and cultural bias.  I don’t believe that two men or two women joining in legal and civil partnership damages my relationship with Gloria.   I find no reason to fear that any other couple undergoing a public or private religious service will cause any harm to the deep commitment to each other that Gloria and I share.  I don’t expect property devaluation, swarms of locusts, mysterious plagues, or armed invaders from a neighboring state, a competing theocracy, or a distant galaxy.  I don’t expect a mob of gay or lesbian parents trying to destroy the PTA.  I’m just not worried by a couple obtaining a civil partnership license at the county offices.  If “they” (any “they”) can afford a formal religious production number with attendants, parties, and a secret destination, more power to them.  They aren’t likely to lower my property values, although I may lower theirs. 

          Lauren Taylor doesn’t answer my question.  Her article does, however, suggest several reasons we should applaud such unions.  In my youth, inter-racial marriages were illegal and rare.  They happen every day now, in every state in the union.  The world is changing, the teavangelists and GOP don’t like that, can’t stop the loss of WASP power brokers and bankers who run the world.  There will eventually be unopposed pairing of gays, lesbians, and other minorities.  It will take time but it will happen because people manage to break the ice, bust the block, and teach the next generation that all humans deserve the same rights.  In the end, it will simply become standard practice.

          The answer to the question remains missing.  I’ve heard many Reponses that display fear, bigotry, lack of education, and religious brainwashing.  I don’t expect to hear an accurate one any time soon.