3 February 2010 Random musings, muttering, & ruminations
On this date in 2000, we buried Gloria’s father, Jacob Rutstein among his fellow soldiers in the Florida National Cemetery, Bushnell FL. He was the 1st Sergeant in the 1st United States medical unit to arrive at the Dachau KL. While he was there he organized the first Shabbat services and the first Pesach Seder held in the camp. He was a wonderful father-in-law and a man to be admired and emulated.
In the midst of the tremendous grief caused by any death in one’s family, I could not help the random thought that I was glad we weren’t burying him on 2 February instead.
I wonder what he would think, sitting in a class on History of the Holocaust and hearing so little interaction from the class. The lack of response from my classmates is disturbing. I would really like to hear some indication that they are bothered by the facts that they are hearing, I find it hard to imagine anyone not being outraged when presented with the fact of a national policy of anti-Semitism such as that of Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. I find it impossible to forgive any institution which supported the disintegration of Jews as members of society.
Yet, some of the things embraced by the Nazis were potentially of benefit to all humanity. Eugenics, as a means of improving the genetic makeup of the species comes to mind. By selectively breeding or by excluding from the breeding population many genetic diseases might be eliminated from the populace. In my own heritage, Tay-Sachs and the other lethal diseases that plague Ashkenazim could be eliminated. Myopia, perhaps diabetes, and less common diseases such as Huntington’s chorea might be removed from our gene pool.
The forced sterilizations that the industrialized nations and great powers visited upon their citizens were, by and large, well intentioned. Female mental hospital patients were at continual risk of pregnancy. There were no working contraceptive medicines prior to WWII. The Sanger program to help women decide when to have children or when not to have children was very progressive for the United States at the time Sanger developed her programs. Only Germany took the practice of eugenics as an invitation to rid itself of the mentally and physically infirm on a scale portending the Holocaust. The Nazis put their brand on eugenics so deeply that even today the word is disturbing to many.
However, with the advances in molecular biology and gene replacement therapy that exist today, eugenics may be practical as a means to eliminate genetically transferred diseases from the gene pool. The alleles that code for Sickle Cell disease, for hemophilia A & B, and for many developmental disorders can be identified and, perhaps, successfully removed from embryos prior to allowing implantation. It may be that the massive reproductive medicine machine that currently cranks out litters of fetuses for women, who insist on giving birth, could be better designed and better used to limit births that damage the gene pool. I’d much rather see tax dollars go to support removing coding for diabetes or myopia from an otherwise healthy embryo than to see those dollars used to provide NICU months for a litter of fertility drug induced preemies unable to live without long-term life-support.
In the matter of Tikun Olam, healing the world, far better to improve the species so that all who follow us are more likely to enjoy good health, than it is to simply add another group of children who may well be developmentally delayed by virtue of being born before they were capable of sustaining their own lives. If the ability to validate the lack of genetic diseases and disorders is available and accurate, I support the use of such techniques in weeding out genetically linked diseases and disorders. I do not support euthanasia of our current population of mentally and physically ill patients.
The Tea Party Convention is apparently going to be a circus in nature with parts of the mob upset about the organizers making a profit. Sarah Palin is gouging the mob for her speaker’s fee, $100,000. There aren’t enough words she can mangle or grammatical errors she can create to justify paying her that amount of money to spread her brand of racism, creationism, and anti-intellectualism. Perhaps she’ll get upset and launch into a tirade before the cameras. One can hope.
I don’t see any platform or policy statement surfacing from this convention. Other than racism, xenophobia, and religious fanaticism, they have very little in common. By the time they get done trying to re-write the Constitution they should be in need of a children’s ghost writer to translate their notes into pictographs so that the unschooled among them can figure out what the rest said.
History class today involved a Nazi propaganda film used to indoctrinate good Germans to support euthanasia of the infirm. CSI was a quick session on trace evidence, collection, handling, and documenting collection. The young woman in front of me in CSI class sat taking no notes, periodically pulling a cell phone from her purse and pounding the keys for several minutes. If I had been the instructor, I’d have asked her to leave the class until she was ready to pay attention. Looking about the room during pauses in the instructor’s lecture, I saw very few people taking any sort of notes. There were, however, lots of cell phones in use. It must be frustrating to try to teach today.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
2 February 2010 I don’t care what the groundhog might say, they look like orphans
2 February 2010 I don’t care what the groundhog might say, they look like orphans
The more I read about this incident, the less I like it.
I’m reminded of children torn from their native cultures and sent to mission schools everywhere missionaries could reach. This is a prime example of how it can happen today. It is my considered opinion that any child unfortunate enough to fall under the care of people such as these will undergo loss of culture, loss of contact with any living relatives, and will most certainly be handed a new religion whether or not they want one.
One wonders how many children would have been kidnapped or appropriated for an unlicensed and undocumented adoption service?
There are thousands of children in this nation who are already in the files of legal adoption agencies. There is no reason to look beyond our borders for children who need homes, education, and support from a new family. There is no reason to up route children from the only lives they have ever known in order to satisfy the desire to save souls while filling empty nests.
The “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” was ill-conceived, illegal in nature, and illegal in execution. The same people that mounted this mission would likely oppose re-settling adult Haitians in Idaho. While they may have had the most honorable intent, they failed to act in any manner approaching legal or ethical. Haiti is right to bring charges.
The various links below describe disregard for the laws of Haiti and the U.S. Have fun reading,
“A document on the Eastside Baptist Web site laid out the group’s plans for a “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission.”
The itinerary for Jan. 23 said: “Drive bus from Santo Domingo into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the D.R.”
The itinerary said the group planned to take the children to a 45-room hotel the group leased in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, where they would live until a permanent orphanage was constructed in nearby Magante.
Although Ms. Silsby said the group did not intend to offer the children for adoption, the Web site said they would “strive” to “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” which subsidizes adoptions “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”
The status of New Life Adoption Foundation was not immediately clear. The group is not registered as an adoption agency in Idaho and does not appear to be registered as a federal nonprofit. The group also did not appear on a list of accredited international adoption agencies on the Web site of the State Department.
Mel Coulter, Ms. Coulter’s father, said of the group, “It was never their intent to establish an adoption agency or anything similar to it.”
“I can’t at all question where they went and what they did because I’m really convinced it was at God’s direction,” he said. “They were acting in faith. That may sound trivial, but they were acting not only in faith but God’s faith.”
But in Haiti, the group may have run into worldly issues they had not anticipated.
Haiti has long been a target for trafficking organizations, Mr. Denis, the justice minister, said, and in the wake of the earthquake authorities had alerted police and judicial officials that criminal organizations might attempt to take advantage of the disaster.
Asked what he thought about the Americans’ claims to be doing God’s work, Mr. Denis shrugged. “What is God’s I leave to God,” he said. “What’s the state’s is ours.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/world/americas/02orphans.html?th&emc=th
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/02/haiti.border.arrests/index.html?hpt=Sbin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703422904575039761361995340.html
The more I read about this incident, the less I like it.
I’m reminded of children torn from their native cultures and sent to mission schools everywhere missionaries could reach. This is a prime example of how it can happen today. It is my considered opinion that any child unfortunate enough to fall under the care of people such as these will undergo loss of culture, loss of contact with any living relatives, and will most certainly be handed a new religion whether or not they want one.
One wonders how many children would have been kidnapped or appropriated for an unlicensed and undocumented adoption service?
There are thousands of children in this nation who are already in the files of legal adoption agencies. There is no reason to look beyond our borders for children who need homes, education, and support from a new family. There is no reason to up route children from the only lives they have ever known in order to satisfy the desire to save souls while filling empty nests.
The “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” was ill-conceived, illegal in nature, and illegal in execution. The same people that mounted this mission would likely oppose re-settling adult Haitians in Idaho. While they may have had the most honorable intent, they failed to act in any manner approaching legal or ethical. Haiti is right to bring charges.
The various links below describe disregard for the laws of Haiti and the U.S. Have fun reading,
“A document on the Eastside Baptist Web site laid out the group’s plans for a “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission.”
The itinerary for Jan. 23 said: “Drive bus from Santo Domingo into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the D.R.”
The itinerary said the group planned to take the children to a 45-room hotel the group leased in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, where they would live until a permanent orphanage was constructed in nearby Magante.
Although Ms. Silsby said the group did not intend to offer the children for adoption, the Web site said they would “strive” to “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” which subsidizes adoptions “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”
The status of New Life Adoption Foundation was not immediately clear. The group is not registered as an adoption agency in Idaho and does not appear to be registered as a federal nonprofit. The group also did not appear on a list of accredited international adoption agencies on the Web site of the State Department.
Mel Coulter, Ms. Coulter’s father, said of the group, “It was never their intent to establish an adoption agency or anything similar to it.”
“I can’t at all question where they went and what they did because I’m really convinced it was at God’s direction,” he said. “They were acting in faith. That may sound trivial, but they were acting not only in faith but God’s faith.”
But in Haiti, the group may have run into worldly issues they had not anticipated.
Haiti has long been a target for trafficking organizations, Mr. Denis, the justice minister, said, and in the wake of the earthquake authorities had alerted police and judicial officials that criminal organizations might attempt to take advantage of the disaster.
Asked what he thought about the Americans’ claims to be doing God’s work, Mr. Denis shrugged. “What is God’s I leave to God,” he said. “What’s the state’s is ours.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/world/americas/02orphans.html?th&emc=th
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/02/haiti.border.arrests/index.html?hpt=Sbin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703422904575039761361995340.html
Monday, February 1, 2010
1 February 2010 Just what Haiti needs more missionaries.
1 February 2010 Just what Haiti needs more missionaries.
Levels of Tzedakah
Certain kinds of tzedakah are considered more meritorious than others. The Talmud describes these different levels of tzedakah, and Rambam organized them into a list. The levels of charity, from the least meritorious to the most meritorious, are:
1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant
Nowhere in this list do I see any suggestion that it is charitable to send missionaries, intent upon converting people suffering from disaster to another religion.
John Travolta wasted jet fuel and landing pattern time/ramp space to fly in 80 scientology higher-ups to perform some sort of mystical voodoo known only to those able to afford and able to swallow the mythos of scientology. What benefit to the earthquake survivors there might be in having these people on the island remains to be seen.
An Idaho Baptist church sent members to Haiti to bring Haitian children back to the U.S. They were arrested by Haitian for “trafficking in children.” Some (10) of the “orphans” they intended to transport into the Dominican Republic without benefit of passports or other legal documents, were not orphans but had at least one known parent. The Haitian government views this as kidnapping and I tend to agree. Unspoken in any televised commentary about the arrest and incarceration of these church members is the certainty that any children they manage to take from Haiti to the U.S. will be told that their current religion is not valid and that they must accept a new religion. This is truly kidnapping of the worst sort.
We’ve seen this before. The Spaniards forced Roman Catholicism on much of the Western Hemisphere, converting the natives from their own faiths to that of the Roman Church. The French tried the same but with less success. The Congregationalists and LDS churches sent missionaries throughout the Pacific Basin, sweeping native cultures from island after island and leaving the natives dispossessed but converted. Cultures died where the Roman Catholic Church set foot.
The U.S. did the same thing to our Native Americans. After we established reservations we established schools where young men and women, removed from their families and reservations, were to be taught new skills for the future and a new faith for their souls. The schools failed miserably and the students lost their native cultures but were handed only bibles to take away the pain of their losses.
Our right wing, religious and political, never tires of telling how Islam plans to conquer the Western world. They are correct, Islam is a religion designed to spread aggressively and by aggression. But so is Christianity, The number of forced conversions that took place in Spain, Italy, France, and the rest of Western Europe is beyond easy calculation. It rivals the number of non-Christians slaughtered during the Crusades.
Our right wing seems to find no problem in constant proselyltization by Christians. If any other religion demanded freedom to behave in such a manner, there would be a call for its elimination from American life.
While we and other nation’s aid in the gradual reconstruction of Haiti we need to protect that nation from corruption and malfeasance. We need to protect it from price gouging, from receiving substandard building materials, contaminated food and water. And we need to protect it from missionaries who can’t wait to load up another bus-load of kids to convert.
Many of these church run children’s aid charities have names designed to tear at people’s emotions and desire to protect children. But they all want to remove the kids from their current culture in order to change their religion. They would do far more good “for the children” if they stayed home and sent money to feed and house all people who need help in Haiti. Haiti needs an embargo on missionaries. Write your Congressman today.
Levels of Tzedakah
Certain kinds of tzedakah are considered more meritorious than others. The Talmud describes these different levels of tzedakah, and Rambam organized them into a list. The levels of charity, from the least meritorious to the most meritorious, are:
1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant
Nowhere in this list do I see any suggestion that it is charitable to send missionaries, intent upon converting people suffering from disaster to another religion.
John Travolta wasted jet fuel and landing pattern time/ramp space to fly in 80 scientology higher-ups to perform some sort of mystical voodoo known only to those able to afford and able to swallow the mythos of scientology. What benefit to the earthquake survivors there might be in having these people on the island remains to be seen.
An Idaho Baptist church sent members to Haiti to bring Haitian children back to the U.S. They were arrested by Haitian for “trafficking in children.” Some (10) of the “orphans” they intended to transport into the Dominican Republic without benefit of passports or other legal documents, were not orphans but had at least one known parent. The Haitian government views this as kidnapping and I tend to agree. Unspoken in any televised commentary about the arrest and incarceration of these church members is the certainty that any children they manage to take from Haiti to the U.S. will be told that their current religion is not valid and that they must accept a new religion. This is truly kidnapping of the worst sort.
We’ve seen this before. The Spaniards forced Roman Catholicism on much of the Western Hemisphere, converting the natives from their own faiths to that of the Roman Church. The French tried the same but with less success. The Congregationalists and LDS churches sent missionaries throughout the Pacific Basin, sweeping native cultures from island after island and leaving the natives dispossessed but converted. Cultures died where the Roman Catholic Church set foot.
The U.S. did the same thing to our Native Americans. After we established reservations we established schools where young men and women, removed from their families and reservations, were to be taught new skills for the future and a new faith for their souls. The schools failed miserably and the students lost their native cultures but were handed only bibles to take away the pain of their losses.
Our right wing, religious and political, never tires of telling how Islam plans to conquer the Western world. They are correct, Islam is a religion designed to spread aggressively and by aggression. But so is Christianity, The number of forced conversions that took place in Spain, Italy, France, and the rest of Western Europe is beyond easy calculation. It rivals the number of non-Christians slaughtered during the Crusades.
Our right wing seems to find no problem in constant proselyltization by Christians. If any other religion demanded freedom to behave in such a manner, there would be a call for its elimination from American life.
While we and other nation’s aid in the gradual reconstruction of Haiti we need to protect that nation from corruption and malfeasance. We need to protect it from price gouging, from receiving substandard building materials, contaminated food and water. And we need to protect it from missionaries who can’t wait to load up another bus-load of kids to convert.
Many of these church run children’s aid charities have names designed to tear at people’s emotions and desire to protect children. But they all want to remove the kids from their current culture in order to change their religion. They would do far more good “for the children” if they stayed home and sent money to feed and house all people who need help in Haiti. Haiti needs an embargo on missionaries. Write your Congressman today.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
31 January 2010 The Supreme Court NASA and the Moon
31 January 2010 The Supreme Court NASA and the Moon
There is intermittent blue sky overhead with random periods of sunlight. Flocks of song birds, sparrows, finches, nut hatches, and a college of Cardinals compete for feeding space and time on the feeders. The current temperature at 1321 is 35.7°F. The frozen glaze of sleet, rain, and snow on the back deck has begun to melt, except for the area closest to the door that remains in shadow most of the day. I’ll have to spread anti-ice pellets tonight.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision concerning freedom of speech for corporations has me as seriously concerned as it does most people who have given the matter thought. Despite nearly a century of precedent and history, the Bush appointees and Reagan appointees persist in their efforts to return the nation to those thrilling days of yester-year when Robber Barons got the government they were able to pay for and the rest of the citizenry was steadfastly ignored unless they had something the wealthy wanted. The Roberts Court may well be the worst thing Bush II left the nation, his most grievous assault upon the republic.
The Bush years were filled with complaints from the right about “judicial activism.” These usually revolved around social and cultural matters, the hot-button concerns that I believe are best left to individuals such as birth control and abortion. The question of equal rights under the law for homosexuals was also hotly contested. The Religious right, the Theocon base for the GOP wants desperately to outlaw abortion and birth control so that women no longer have any choice in the question of reproduction. That the “sacred fetus” becomes a “burden upon society” once it is delivered, never seems to change the equation. The GOP base will attend rally after rally to stop abortion but will never contribute or propose money for immunizations, adequate meals, housing, day care, education, or any of the other items that the no longer sacred child needs in order to become a functional member of society.
The question of “gay marriage” somehow is tied to the Theocons’ insistence that two men or two women marrying will somehow cause millions of heterosexual marriages to fall apart and become valueless. I fail to understand how anyone else’s marriage changes the value of mine.
Now that the conservative time bomb planted by Bush has begun to detonate, the “judicial activism” of the Roberts Court is somehow magically acceptable, and appropriate. The Court has reinforced the legal opinion that corporations have the same 1st Amendment rights as do individual citizens. This works out well if “you” happen to be a “corporation” in need of purchasing an elected official. “You” are now able to spend as freely as you can afford to buy the best Congress you can purchase. Of course, the ability to designate those funds used to buy elected influence as a “business expense” makes the deal even sweeter.
I, as a private citizen, have freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. What I do not have; what most private citizens do not have, is the cash reserves necessary to buy Congress. I can vote in primary elections – sort of a joke where I live – and I can write letters to local media. I can e-mail, call, and write my elected officials. I can ask to speak to those officials face-to-face in order to convey my concerns to them. I have done all of these things repeatedly. Once in a while my letters are printed in local media. Since our Congresswoman in Florida never bothered to set up the e-mail link on her official web page until I called the local office and complained, since our current Congressman here in TN has no working e-mail link on his official web site despite my complaints, I doubt seriously that anything I have submitted by e-mail has ever seen the whites of their eyes. As for the face-to-face meetings that might actually provide an opportunity for conversation; I don’t travel in the right circles, belong to the right church, eat at the right restaurants and country clubs, or have sufficient discretionary cash to catch their attention. Like most citizens, I can be safely ignored by my Congressman and Senators; and I am. Corporations, capable of funding an entire re-election campaign if they choose, cannot be. Historically, they haven’t been. But now, following the Roberts’ Court’s recent decision, corporate voices have been transmuted from the loudest on the playing field, into a heavily amplified presence capable of shouting down single citizens or the collective voices of private citizens. We have just become, officially, USA, Inc. It was wonderful to have been a citizen of the USA that we once knew; the nation that once had the courage and leadership to tell corporations, “No!” I don’t think I’m going to like the corporate version of my nation at all.
In other news, the Obama budget puts a halt to any plans to return men to the moon and to establish a working colony. NASA’s engineers, rocket scientists, support staff, and other workers now face job loss and worse. The dream of a moon colony has been in my mind for ever. I’m of the generation that watched Willi Ley on Disney explain how the circular space station would look and function, how the three-stage lifting vehicles would take men to the moon and bring them back safely. Then we watched those things become reality. Apollo worked and we watched men from the USA walk on the moon and return home. If the ISS-1 is not the bicycle tire space station proposed by Ley, it will do nicely and for the most part, we, NASA, put it there. Now our shuttles are falling apart and we have not completed the Ares I lifting vehicle needed to replace them. The Aries V was also to provide lift to return to the moon. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/index.html
The loss of the moon mission, the retreat from space exploration as a manned program and the potential loss of NASA in coming years speaks volumes about our status as a great power in today’s scientific world. India, Japan, and China are all poised to take their place in the space race. Obama’s people hope that our previous leadership role will be filled by commercial concerns. I don’t see that happening. I don’t see the corporations we have today doing anything that would advance national status at the expense of their executives’ bonuses for doing nothing but place-holding. There is no nationalism in our corporations sufficient to develop and spur a manned-space exploration program. The need for annual profitability precludes any long-term program such as Apollo being launched by private concern. While Virgin Air plans a space tourism thrill ride to lift rich people into an interval of weightlessness, this may not pan out due to cost/participant or it may cease operation once Branson has discovered whether or not he is subject to “space-sickness.”
Certainly no private corporation will be willing to undertake a large-scale program involving private citizens and high-risk, experimental, rocket-propelled vehicles. Government programs provide staff drawn from the ranks of our military, ready to risk their lives in such vehicles for the advancement of the program and for the benefit of science and engineering, doing a job that will, by definition, lead to multiple and repeated fatalities. Imagine the lawsuits that would have plagued a corporation that constructed the poorly designed and built Apollo module that took Grissom, White, and Chaffee to their fiery end. The first shuttle failure would have been the last, as without a government program to provide a market, there would have been no corporation willing to continue flying the shuttle for commercial purposes.
Heinlein postulated and wrote of a commercial venture to launch a moon trip. He was right in many predictions but I don’t believe his prediction of a corporate-driven moon colony will ever take place. Greed, corporate returns and huge, unwarranted bonuses are more important to men who seek power in business and finance than are science, engineering, and exploration.
To see a corporate venture to the moon take place will require the discovery of some material as valuable as gold, or a pocket of weapons-grade uranium the size of Cuba.
Apollo 14 Mission
Crew Alan B. Shepard Jr. Commander
Edgar D. Mitchell Lunar Module Pilot
Stuart A. Roosa Command Module Pilot
Launch Jan. 31, 1971; 4:03 p.m. EDT 39 years ago today.
There is intermittent blue sky overhead with random periods of sunlight. Flocks of song birds, sparrows, finches, nut hatches, and a college of Cardinals compete for feeding space and time on the feeders. The current temperature at 1321 is 35.7°F. The frozen glaze of sleet, rain, and snow on the back deck has begun to melt, except for the area closest to the door that remains in shadow most of the day. I’ll have to spread anti-ice pellets tonight.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision concerning freedom of speech for corporations has me as seriously concerned as it does most people who have given the matter thought. Despite nearly a century of precedent and history, the Bush appointees and Reagan appointees persist in their efforts to return the nation to those thrilling days of yester-year when Robber Barons got the government they were able to pay for and the rest of the citizenry was steadfastly ignored unless they had something the wealthy wanted. The Roberts Court may well be the worst thing Bush II left the nation, his most grievous assault upon the republic.
The Bush years were filled with complaints from the right about “judicial activism.” These usually revolved around social and cultural matters, the hot-button concerns that I believe are best left to individuals such as birth control and abortion. The question of equal rights under the law for homosexuals was also hotly contested. The Religious right, the Theocon base for the GOP wants desperately to outlaw abortion and birth control so that women no longer have any choice in the question of reproduction. That the “sacred fetus” becomes a “burden upon society” once it is delivered, never seems to change the equation. The GOP base will attend rally after rally to stop abortion but will never contribute or propose money for immunizations, adequate meals, housing, day care, education, or any of the other items that the no longer sacred child needs in order to become a functional member of society.
The question of “gay marriage” somehow is tied to the Theocons’ insistence that two men or two women marrying will somehow cause millions of heterosexual marriages to fall apart and become valueless. I fail to understand how anyone else’s marriage changes the value of mine.
Now that the conservative time bomb planted by Bush has begun to detonate, the “judicial activism” of the Roberts Court is somehow magically acceptable, and appropriate. The Court has reinforced the legal opinion that corporations have the same 1st Amendment rights as do individual citizens. This works out well if “you” happen to be a “corporation” in need of purchasing an elected official. “You” are now able to spend as freely as you can afford to buy the best Congress you can purchase. Of course, the ability to designate those funds used to buy elected influence as a “business expense” makes the deal even sweeter.
I, as a private citizen, have freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. What I do not have; what most private citizens do not have, is the cash reserves necessary to buy Congress. I can vote in primary elections – sort of a joke where I live – and I can write letters to local media. I can e-mail, call, and write my elected officials. I can ask to speak to those officials face-to-face in order to convey my concerns to them. I have done all of these things repeatedly. Once in a while my letters are printed in local media. Since our Congresswoman in Florida never bothered to set up the e-mail link on her official web page until I called the local office and complained, since our current Congressman here in TN has no working e-mail link on his official web site despite my complaints, I doubt seriously that anything I have submitted by e-mail has ever seen the whites of their eyes. As for the face-to-face meetings that might actually provide an opportunity for conversation; I don’t travel in the right circles, belong to the right church, eat at the right restaurants and country clubs, or have sufficient discretionary cash to catch their attention. Like most citizens, I can be safely ignored by my Congressman and Senators; and I am. Corporations, capable of funding an entire re-election campaign if they choose, cannot be. Historically, they haven’t been. But now, following the Roberts’ Court’s recent decision, corporate voices have been transmuted from the loudest on the playing field, into a heavily amplified presence capable of shouting down single citizens or the collective voices of private citizens. We have just become, officially, USA, Inc. It was wonderful to have been a citizen of the USA that we once knew; the nation that once had the courage and leadership to tell corporations, “No!” I don’t think I’m going to like the corporate version of my nation at all.
In other news, the Obama budget puts a halt to any plans to return men to the moon and to establish a working colony. NASA’s engineers, rocket scientists, support staff, and other workers now face job loss and worse. The dream of a moon colony has been in my mind for ever. I’m of the generation that watched Willi Ley on Disney explain how the circular space station would look and function, how the three-stage lifting vehicles would take men to the moon and bring them back safely. Then we watched those things become reality. Apollo worked and we watched men from the USA walk on the moon and return home. If the ISS-1 is not the bicycle tire space station proposed by Ley, it will do nicely and for the most part, we, NASA, put it there. Now our shuttles are falling apart and we have not completed the Ares I lifting vehicle needed to replace them. The Aries V was also to provide lift to return to the moon. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/index.html
The loss of the moon mission, the retreat from space exploration as a manned program and the potential loss of NASA in coming years speaks volumes about our status as a great power in today’s scientific world. India, Japan, and China are all poised to take their place in the space race. Obama’s people hope that our previous leadership role will be filled by commercial concerns. I don’t see that happening. I don’t see the corporations we have today doing anything that would advance national status at the expense of their executives’ bonuses for doing nothing but place-holding. There is no nationalism in our corporations sufficient to develop and spur a manned-space exploration program. The need for annual profitability precludes any long-term program such as Apollo being launched by private concern. While Virgin Air plans a space tourism thrill ride to lift rich people into an interval of weightlessness, this may not pan out due to cost/participant or it may cease operation once Branson has discovered whether or not he is subject to “space-sickness.”
Certainly no private corporation will be willing to undertake a large-scale program involving private citizens and high-risk, experimental, rocket-propelled vehicles. Government programs provide staff drawn from the ranks of our military, ready to risk their lives in such vehicles for the advancement of the program and for the benefit of science and engineering, doing a job that will, by definition, lead to multiple and repeated fatalities. Imagine the lawsuits that would have plagued a corporation that constructed the poorly designed and built Apollo module that took Grissom, White, and Chaffee to their fiery end. The first shuttle failure would have been the last, as without a government program to provide a market, there would have been no corporation willing to continue flying the shuttle for commercial purposes.
Heinlein postulated and wrote of a commercial venture to launch a moon trip. He was right in many predictions but I don’t believe his prediction of a corporate-driven moon colony will ever take place. Greed, corporate returns and huge, unwarranted bonuses are more important to men who seek power in business and finance than are science, engineering, and exploration.
To see a corporate venture to the moon take place will require the discovery of some material as valuable as gold, or a pocket of weapons-grade uranium the size of Cuba.
Apollo 14 Mission
Crew Alan B. Shepard Jr. Commander
Edgar D. Mitchell Lunar Module Pilot
Stuart A. Roosa Command Module Pilot
Launch Jan. 31, 1971; 4:03 p.m. EDT 39 years ago today.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
30 January 2010 Ten degrees and getting colder down by Boulder Dam today
30 January 2010 Ten degrees and getting colder down by Boulder Dam today
The lead in line is from a Gordon Lightfoot song. I used to play and sing it, along with other Lightfoot material.
The last time we saw Lightfoot in concert was in Sarasota FL. We had free tickets to the concert and were really looking forward to it. Lightfoot arrived on stage and proceeded to perform songs he had written after nearly bleeding to death because his liver had been destroyed by years of ethanol abuse. I’m sure the material came from the bottom of his despair and was highly significant to his potential recovery. We left at intermission, having listened to an entire set of “I’m in recovery” songs. We’d hoped to hear some of his old and proven material and could have stomached a few of the new and personal songs. The concert had the feel of a Salvation Army recruitment drive on a street corner in a red light district. It wasn’t going anywhere and it wasn’t changing anything.
12 step recoveries while certainly the return to productive life for many people; leave me looking for the nearest door to anywhere. I truly hope they help the people who undertake them as a means of defeating an addiction. Like jail house conversions to Christianity or Islam, I don’t trust the sincerity of too many people in 12 step programs.
The forecast foot of snow has not materialized. Instead, a pocket of warmer air moved in at lower altitude and melted falling snow. This morning, I found 3-4 inches of sodden, heavy snow with an icy crust. The county has already scraped our road and it will soon be ice coated. While I was shoveling the decks at 0630 a light but steady rain continued to fall. That has continued off and on all morning along with intermittent light snow, pellet snow, sleet, and freezing rain. We’re hoping that the freezing rain moves away. The entire eastern border of Tennessee has a band of snow and freezing rain entraining up toward Virginia. All the precipitation is forecast to end this afternoon. Travel is going to be extremely hazardous. The temperature sat around 32°F all night and is currently at 34°F. We are told it will plummet in the evening, hence today’s lead in.
The decks are already covered with a layer of frozen rain. Sleet is imbedded in that layer, providing texture but no traction. Venturing out onto the decks will be like skating.
Gloria managed to take a few photographs last night as snow covered the back deck.
Today is most likely to be spent on class work. Gloria has a project that needs to be at a higher stage of completion by Monday. I have several hundred pages of reading to finish. There’s wood to be brought inside, a stove to be tended, and dinner of some nature will help keep us warm. I’ve two chuck eye steaks thawing for dinner. I may serve them with sautéed yellow squash.
I write this with sincere gratitude for the warm dry conditions I am presently enjoying. I’ve hitch-hiked a bit when I was younger. It’s not a safe or timely means of travel. I sit here and write with warm phalanges rather than risking frost bite along with other dangers. There are no boots warm enough to sustain hope when the sun is sinking and every car and truck flies by in a cloud of dirty, gritty, chilly, mist. Maybe Lightfoot knows more about hitch-hiking than I do. Maybe that lonesome knowledge is what drew him to the false warmth of ethanol that destroyed his liver, nearly took his life, and was also the source of the songs that left us unsatisfied with the concert and unwilling to sit through the second half of a concert that was going nowhere. Maybe he’s spent too many nights on the side of the road down by Boulder Dam. I’ve never hitched around Boulder Dam but I know where it is. That ages me, and you; if you have an inkling where Boulder Dam can be found. “I’ll take geography for $2000, Alex!”
The photo used in this entry was taken by Gloria Lenon, 29 January 2010. Thank you for permission to use it.
The lead in line is from a Gordon Lightfoot song. I used to play and sing it, along with other Lightfoot material.
The last time we saw Lightfoot in concert was in Sarasota FL. We had free tickets to the concert and were really looking forward to it. Lightfoot arrived on stage and proceeded to perform songs he had written after nearly bleeding to death because his liver had been destroyed by years of ethanol abuse. I’m sure the material came from the bottom of his despair and was highly significant to his potential recovery. We left at intermission, having listened to an entire set of “I’m in recovery” songs. We’d hoped to hear some of his old and proven material and could have stomached a few of the new and personal songs. The concert had the feel of a Salvation Army recruitment drive on a street corner in a red light district. It wasn’t going anywhere and it wasn’t changing anything.
12 step recoveries while certainly the return to productive life for many people; leave me looking for the nearest door to anywhere. I truly hope they help the people who undertake them as a means of defeating an addiction. Like jail house conversions to Christianity or Islam, I don’t trust the sincerity of too many people in 12 step programs.
The forecast foot of snow has not materialized. Instead, a pocket of warmer air moved in at lower altitude and melted falling snow. This morning, I found 3-4 inches of sodden, heavy snow with an icy crust. The county has already scraped our road and it will soon be ice coated. While I was shoveling the decks at 0630 a light but steady rain continued to fall. That has continued off and on all morning along with intermittent light snow, pellet snow, sleet, and freezing rain. We’re hoping that the freezing rain moves away. The entire eastern border of Tennessee has a band of snow and freezing rain entraining up toward Virginia. All the precipitation is forecast to end this afternoon. Travel is going to be extremely hazardous. The temperature sat around 32°F all night and is currently at 34°F. We are told it will plummet in the evening, hence today’s lead in.
The decks are already covered with a layer of frozen rain. Sleet is imbedded in that layer, providing texture but no traction. Venturing out onto the decks will be like skating.
Gloria managed to take a few photographs last night as snow covered the back deck.
Today is most likely to be spent on class work. Gloria has a project that needs to be at a higher stage of completion by Monday. I have several hundred pages of reading to finish. There’s wood to be brought inside, a stove to be tended, and dinner of some nature will help keep us warm. I’ve two chuck eye steaks thawing for dinner. I may serve them with sautéed yellow squash.
I write this with sincere gratitude for the warm dry conditions I am presently enjoying. I’ve hitch-hiked a bit when I was younger. It’s not a safe or timely means of travel. I sit here and write with warm phalanges rather than risking frost bite along with other dangers. There are no boots warm enough to sustain hope when the sun is sinking and every car and truck flies by in a cloud of dirty, gritty, chilly, mist. Maybe Lightfoot knows more about hitch-hiking than I do. Maybe that lonesome knowledge is what drew him to the false warmth of ethanol that destroyed his liver, nearly took his life, and was also the source of the songs that left us unsatisfied with the concert and unwilling to sit through the second half of a concert that was going nowhere. Maybe he’s spent too many nights on the side of the road down by Boulder Dam. I’ve never hitched around Boulder Dam but I know where it is. That ages me, and you; if you have an inkling where Boulder Dam can be found. “I’ll take geography for $2000, Alex!”
The photo used in this entry was taken by Gloria Lenon, 29 January 2010. Thank you for permission to use it.
Friday, January 29, 2010
29 January 2010 Snow business or no business
29 January 2010 Snow business or no business
At 0600 this morning there was no cancellation of ETSU classes. Up, and about the day’s chores. Dog dragged but apprehensive nature to her behavior as we headed down the driveway to the road and the mailbox. There is real hostility between Loki and the infamous neighbor’s dogs. Loki is right to be cautious. They were behaving like a pack intent on harming her yesterday and there is no reason to believe the levels of aggression will drop.
Stoked up the fire, punched the coffee maker into production. I love the smell of coffee in the morning. Green Mountain coffee is highly aromatic and the touch of cardamom we add to each brew makes it even better.
The winter storm warning has been pushed backward 2 hours until 1500 today. I guess that some of the air masses have slowed their progress. I haven’t had time to look at the maps and projections as thoroughly as I would like. But what I have seen makes me happy to have wood, food, and gasoline laid by for the weekend.
Classes in many local schools are cancelled. The mountain roads are not the best for large busses full of kids when they are dry. Add snow, sleet, and maybe ice, and the reason for cancellation is readily apparent.
Gloria had an orthopedics appointment in Johnson City at 1340. They called about 0815 to change her appointment time to 1140. That actually is good for us. We’ll meet at the library here in Johnson City after her injection and my classes, We’ll have time to find some light reading for the next few days, go by the pharmacy and bank, and then head home before the weather gets ugly. That is, of course, if all goes according to the National Weather Service forecast. They’ve been pretty accurate on these things so far this winter.
We start finger printing education today, lifting prints, and rolling impressions for records. I had Gloria plant the seed of an idea that I was going to fume and print that yellow bag discussed yesterday. I have no intention of doing so but the idea could feed their levels of paranoia and perhaps give them some slight pause the next time they collectively behave like middle school remedial students bent on vandalism. We’re certain the bag was retaliation for some imagined slight. We have no real idea, thought, which imagined slight it might have been. I think, as a family, they would be hard-pressed to field a combined IQ over 90. Individually, they all fall into the left lower quad of the bell curve.
We returned home almost exactly at 1400. We managed the library, the bank, and had no further business in town. The traffic was heavy as far as Jonesborough with long lines of vehicles waiting to turn into Wal-Mart. The various grocery parking lots were packed. Everyone seems to be taking this winter warning seriously.
I looked outside at 1515 and it was beginning to snow. The outside temperature here is 35.2°F so we’ll watch it snow without accumulating for a while. The predicted low is 29°F for tonight with 5 – 9 inches of accumulation. I’m hoping for five. The storm is producing ice across Arkansas, Missouri, and into Tennessee, with Memphis and Nashville becoming skating rinks. Our region is still forecast to receive snow rather than ice. The National Weather Service cautions about snow laden lines and snow laden trees. Doubtless, there will be power outages. We can hope that the previous snow and wind have decreased local potential power loss; but that will play out according to the storm’s intensity and the laws of physics.
At 1615 it is 33°F and beginning to stick on the decks and to pile up in corners. We’ve dragged the dog, put out extra turkey scratch, and are ready to hunker down and listen to the snow fall. When we were just outside, the air had the wet density, the quiet thickness that portends heavy snowfall. The song birds are feeding almost frantically. Two male Cardinals are dominating the tray feeder with the smaller and less aggressive birds working over the deck for seeds spilled by squirrels.
Classes today were about the same. We followed the path of Hitler’s post WWI rise to power. There have been many comparisons of the current U.S. economic and cultural conditions to the Weimar Republic and most lack serious validity. But the immense anger present in the tea party mobs is of concern to me. I see the anti-intellectual, anti- education, anti-immigrant, racist components of the tea party combined with the heavy financial backing of a “news” network and the prevalence of demagogues all ready to stoke the furnaces of hatred for profit and political power. It’s not hard at all to see the tea party mobs spawning an American equivalent to the brown shirt thugs of Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung. If the Christian Identity movement, largely neo-Nazis cloaked in fundamentalist Christianity can work a deal with the tea party mobs, we may see street violence taking place in our streets at levels not seen since WWII.
The CSI class was essentially a self-managed lab. Miller brought in various finger print powders and brushes, 3x5 index cards and lifting tape. Then he left for a meeting. We milled around putting prints on various objects and then bringing them into visibility with brush and powder prior to lifting them. Rather than join the clusters of people crowding around nearly every smooth surface, I pulled out my water bottle, put two fresh prints on it and then developed them. The technique worked. The documentation photos I took with my cell phone camera were less successful. I’ll need to add my camera to the daily load of gear for class. Labs of this nature are the only place you can make mistakes without something bad coming of it. Lessons learned:
1 no cell phone cameras
2 photograph entire object with prints, not just the print.
3 lay prints on white side of index card, not lined side.
4 avoid use of flash for prints under tape.
At 1711 we have ca.1/4 inch of snow on the deck. The turkey flock is feeding voraciously as if they, too, have heard the winter storm warning.
Shabbat Shalom!
At 0600 this morning there was no cancellation of ETSU classes. Up, and about the day’s chores. Dog dragged but apprehensive nature to her behavior as we headed down the driveway to the road and the mailbox. There is real hostility between Loki and the infamous neighbor’s dogs. Loki is right to be cautious. They were behaving like a pack intent on harming her yesterday and there is no reason to believe the levels of aggression will drop.
Stoked up the fire, punched the coffee maker into production. I love the smell of coffee in the morning. Green Mountain coffee is highly aromatic and the touch of cardamom we add to each brew makes it even better.
The winter storm warning has been pushed backward 2 hours until 1500 today. I guess that some of the air masses have slowed their progress. I haven’t had time to look at the maps and projections as thoroughly as I would like. But what I have seen makes me happy to have wood, food, and gasoline laid by for the weekend.
Classes in many local schools are cancelled. The mountain roads are not the best for large busses full of kids when they are dry. Add snow, sleet, and maybe ice, and the reason for cancellation is readily apparent.
Gloria had an orthopedics appointment in Johnson City at 1340. They called about 0815 to change her appointment time to 1140. That actually is good for us. We’ll meet at the library here in Johnson City after her injection and my classes, We’ll have time to find some light reading for the next few days, go by the pharmacy and bank, and then head home before the weather gets ugly. That is, of course, if all goes according to the National Weather Service forecast. They’ve been pretty accurate on these things so far this winter.
We start finger printing education today, lifting prints, and rolling impressions for records. I had Gloria plant the seed of an idea that I was going to fume and print that yellow bag discussed yesterday. I have no intention of doing so but the idea could feed their levels of paranoia and perhaps give them some slight pause the next time they collectively behave like middle school remedial students bent on vandalism. We’re certain the bag was retaliation for some imagined slight. We have no real idea, thought, which imagined slight it might have been. I think, as a family, they would be hard-pressed to field a combined IQ over 90. Individually, they all fall into the left lower quad of the bell curve.
We returned home almost exactly at 1400. We managed the library, the bank, and had no further business in town. The traffic was heavy as far as Jonesborough with long lines of vehicles waiting to turn into Wal-Mart. The various grocery parking lots were packed. Everyone seems to be taking this winter warning seriously.
I looked outside at 1515 and it was beginning to snow. The outside temperature here is 35.2°F so we’ll watch it snow without accumulating for a while. The predicted low is 29°F for tonight with 5 – 9 inches of accumulation. I’m hoping for five. The storm is producing ice across Arkansas, Missouri, and into Tennessee, with Memphis and Nashville becoming skating rinks. Our region is still forecast to receive snow rather than ice. The National Weather Service cautions about snow laden lines and snow laden trees. Doubtless, there will be power outages. We can hope that the previous snow and wind have decreased local potential power loss; but that will play out according to the storm’s intensity and the laws of physics.
At 1615 it is 33°F and beginning to stick on the decks and to pile up in corners. We’ve dragged the dog, put out extra turkey scratch, and are ready to hunker down and listen to the snow fall. When we were just outside, the air had the wet density, the quiet thickness that portends heavy snowfall. The song birds are feeding almost frantically. Two male Cardinals are dominating the tray feeder with the smaller and less aggressive birds working over the deck for seeds spilled by squirrels.
Classes today were about the same. We followed the path of Hitler’s post WWI rise to power. There have been many comparisons of the current U.S. economic and cultural conditions to the Weimar Republic and most lack serious validity. But the immense anger present in the tea party mobs is of concern to me. I see the anti-intellectual, anti- education, anti-immigrant, racist components of the tea party combined with the heavy financial backing of a “news” network and the prevalence of demagogues all ready to stoke the furnaces of hatred for profit and political power. It’s not hard at all to see the tea party mobs spawning an American equivalent to the brown shirt thugs of Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung. If the Christian Identity movement, largely neo-Nazis cloaked in fundamentalist Christianity can work a deal with the tea party mobs, we may see street violence taking place in our streets at levels not seen since WWII.
The CSI class was essentially a self-managed lab. Miller brought in various finger print powders and brushes, 3x5 index cards and lifting tape. Then he left for a meeting. We milled around putting prints on various objects and then bringing them into visibility with brush and powder prior to lifting them. Rather than join the clusters of people crowding around nearly every smooth surface, I pulled out my water bottle, put two fresh prints on it and then developed them. The technique worked. The documentation photos I took with my cell phone camera were less successful. I’ll need to add my camera to the daily load of gear for class. Labs of this nature are the only place you can make mistakes without something bad coming of it. Lessons learned:
1 no cell phone cameras
2 photograph entire object with prints, not just the print.
3 lay prints on white side of index card, not lined side.
4 avoid use of flash for prints under tape.
At 1711 we have ca.1/4 inch of snow on the deck. The turkey flock is feeding voraciously as if they, too, have heard the winter storm warning.
Shabbat Shalom!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
28 January 2010 I didn’t realize the gene pool was that shallow
28 January 2010 I didn’t realize the gene pool was that shallow
Today’s hike with Mike began at 0930 and was essentially uneventful if one disregards the concerted attempts by the infamous neighbor’s dogs to gut and hamstring Loki. The Wolf-Shepherd mix was aiming for her neck when I pulled her away. I think she may have put a fang onto his muzzle as he missed his strike. The level of aggression from these dogs is becoming unacceptable.
On the way down to Mikes it was impossible to miss the amount of trash which had blown from the neighbor’s yard onto our property. On the way back I decided to clean up the blown trash, the dog-dragged trash, and the thrown trash this morning. Other people are unhappy with the amount of blown trash coming from the house across from our property.
After navigating another dog aggression display from all three dogs owned by the neighbor, I put Loki inside, changed boots and coats, and headed out with bag, stick, and grabber. I found and picked up multiple black plastic fast-food containers, multiple white plastic fast-food containers, beer bottles, soda bottles, plastic cups, drink cans, and a large “Dollar General” bag made instantly noticeable by its bright yellow color. When I went to pick it up, using the grabber, the bag opened enough to reveal ca. 5 pounds of feces. Since this bag first appeared in mid last week, I believe that one of the neighbor’s highly-cultured daughters placed it there. It could not have blown there, did not fall from a passing truck, or appear by magic. We can only assume that the Jerry Springer rejects thought to place it there for us to pick up. I emptied the bag and threw the bag away; leaving the contents for them to step in should they return with more trash.
I must admit my first impulse was to return bag and contents to the neighbor’s yard. But there is enough hostility coming from them as is. They apparently believe we are the source of all their troubles these days. The neighbor is extremely paranoid to begin with and has put up cameras to prevent people approaching his house. We have no desire to set foot on their property and certainly don’t intend to invite them onto ours. So the ill-mannered, juvenile natured, sack of feces just gets recorded and logged as further reason to avoid any contact with the neighbor and his ill-begotten spawn. The Austin Lounge Lizards recorded a song, “Shallow End of the Gene Pool.” The neighbor and his family must have come from the dried up muck beneath the pool.
We went grocery shopping today along with, apparently, half of Greeneville. There is a winter storm warning in effect for tomorrow afternoon and people recall the last big storm in December all too well. We’re stocked up for a few days of snowfall but power is always a concern. We have enough wood to keep warm.
Unless ETSU cancels classes tomorrow, I have class. Gloria also has a doctor’s appointment in Johnson City at 1340. I’m planning on meeting her there and then following her to the library and home. We’ll be lucky if the weather holds long enough for us to get everything done and off the road.
Tomorrow is my youngest child, Jedediah’s birthday. He’s living in the Boston/Cambridge area working at some job. He hasn’t communicated at all with me since blowing off a dinner get together in the summer of 2005. His siblings hear from him once in a while. I’ll e-mail him and offer birthday greetings. There will be no response from him.
It is time to finish this off and get dinner underway.
Today’s hike with Mike began at 0930 and was essentially uneventful if one disregards the concerted attempts by the infamous neighbor’s dogs to gut and hamstring Loki. The Wolf-Shepherd mix was aiming for her neck when I pulled her away. I think she may have put a fang onto his muzzle as he missed his strike. The level of aggression from these dogs is becoming unacceptable.
On the way down to Mikes it was impossible to miss the amount of trash which had blown from the neighbor’s yard onto our property. On the way back I decided to clean up the blown trash, the dog-dragged trash, and the thrown trash this morning. Other people are unhappy with the amount of blown trash coming from the house across from our property.
After navigating another dog aggression display from all three dogs owned by the neighbor, I put Loki inside, changed boots and coats, and headed out with bag, stick, and grabber. I found and picked up multiple black plastic fast-food containers, multiple white plastic fast-food containers, beer bottles, soda bottles, plastic cups, drink cans, and a large “Dollar General” bag made instantly noticeable by its bright yellow color. When I went to pick it up, using the grabber, the bag opened enough to reveal ca. 5 pounds of feces. Since this bag first appeared in mid last week, I believe that one of the neighbor’s highly-cultured daughters placed it there. It could not have blown there, did not fall from a passing truck, or appear by magic. We can only assume that the Jerry Springer rejects thought to place it there for us to pick up. I emptied the bag and threw the bag away; leaving the contents for them to step in should they return with more trash.
I must admit my first impulse was to return bag and contents to the neighbor’s yard. But there is enough hostility coming from them as is. They apparently believe we are the source of all their troubles these days. The neighbor is extremely paranoid to begin with and has put up cameras to prevent people approaching his house. We have no desire to set foot on their property and certainly don’t intend to invite them onto ours. So the ill-mannered, juvenile natured, sack of feces just gets recorded and logged as further reason to avoid any contact with the neighbor and his ill-begotten spawn. The Austin Lounge Lizards recorded a song, “Shallow End of the Gene Pool.” The neighbor and his family must have come from the dried up muck beneath the pool.
We went grocery shopping today along with, apparently, half of Greeneville. There is a winter storm warning in effect for tomorrow afternoon and people recall the last big storm in December all too well. We’re stocked up for a few days of snowfall but power is always a concern. We have enough wood to keep warm.
Unless ETSU cancels classes tomorrow, I have class. Gloria also has a doctor’s appointment in Johnson City at 1340. I’m planning on meeting her there and then following her to the library and home. We’ll be lucky if the weather holds long enough for us to get everything done and off the road.
Tomorrow is my youngest child, Jedediah’s birthday. He’s living in the Boston/Cambridge area working at some job. He hasn’t communicated at all with me since blowing off a dinner get together in the summer of 2005. His siblings hear from him once in a while. I’ll e-mail him and offer birthday greetings. There will be no response from him.
It is time to finish this off and get dinner underway.
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