Iran..another letter to the editor

“I want to know what it takes to remember, when you know that you’ve heard it before, when a government lies to its people, and a country is drifting to war… I want to know who the men in the shadows are, I want to hear somebody asking them why, they can be counted on to tell us who our enemies, are, but they are never the ones to fight or to die..”

      So Jackson Browne wrote in 1986 in his song “Lives In the Balance” and so it applies to Mr. Trump, Mr. Pompeo, Mr. Bolton and all those behind the scenes people who are currently manufacturing a war with Iran. Has this country learned nothing since the Bush administration and the horrendous mess we created in the Middle East with the lies of that era? What will it take for mostly white middle age men to acquire emotional, ethical and moral wisdom?  Is this primarily a Republican disease- to hide behind fragile egos to defend violence of horrific proportions? Are these the same people who will fight tooth and nail to defend unborn embryos yet think nothing of slaughtering thousands of foreign children and babies in the name of American justice and democracy?  So Mr. Trump has  withdrawn from a nuclear deal that more thoughtful people in the world considered to be working, and now seeks to provoke another war-or, at least, to expand it to another front in that part of the world.

    And who will be one of our most loyal allies? Saudi Arabia, a nation that oppresses its female population and whose leader Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman sanctioned the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This should not be acceptable to a civilized nation that claims to be the champion of freedom and justice. When a government drifts away from truth and facts and loses its moral compass, it becomes imperative for people of character to defend what is right and just for All people-not merely those of one particular nation or another. To do anything less is to equate ourselves with those nations we claim to be ‘demonic axis of evil’.  The common person in Iran wants to live as much as the common American, but is subject to the same propaganda from those in power as Americans are- which makes facts and critical analysis all the more precious. Centuries ago the world embraced the scientific method to sift Truth from the dark ages of ignorance, and that careful scrutiny is needed now more than ever. Be sure you have the facts before supporting anything so vicious as war, or anything else that affects the planet.

Woods Walk

Walked a few miles atop a mountain near town in which the woods undergrowth is mostly ferns. They are an extremely successful species having originated some 360 million years ago and in the modern forms for some 145 mya.  The permanent puddles are filled with peeper tadpoles and one other larger species-probably a wood frog. The truck has been rotting in that spot ( about a mile from the road) for as long as I have been living here-13 years-and no doubt longer than that. It takes decades for nature to reclaim the metal, and without road salt accelerating the rust, it might be most of a century. This was just another walk, filled with dusky skippers, a few bothersome deer flies and a good hard climb. I have had thousands of such walks with nothing out of the ordinary happening yet filled with the benefits of both nature and physical exercise. They fall away from my conscious memory unless preserved in my journal or here, but I presume they have lodged somewhere in my subconscious. There is a certain well earned serenity I enjoy that I suppose has come now that the anxious lessons of youth have been experienced, and I feel fortunate that I yet have the health and freedom to walk where and when I like.

Buzzard Swamp in spring

   It has been almost six months since I walked Buzzard Swamp, where back in November there were bald eagles and the first dusting of snow. Two days ago tree swallows were common and I noticed this robin egg in which an unfortunate fly had become stuck in the yolk while trying to have a meal. Those swallows look cold but the temperature was in the mid sixties so their huddled appearance is misleading. Geese and red wing blackbirds were also abundant in the open marshy fields, as were angle wing butterflies and a few cabbage butterflies. It is still early spring here with an incomplete canopy and the first blossoms like dandelion, adders tongue, violets and mustard.

Another Tornado

There t'was another F1/F2 tornado in town on the 14th, coming from the northwest and spinning across the Allegheny and Conewango rivers before doing some damage a block north of the house. The warning sirens went off at 8:03 pm and the storm hit about 15 minutes later. I watched from the front porch and through a window to the back of the house and saw dark clouds and rain and wind, but never knew a tornado had been so close until the next day. Actually, straight line 'blowdown' winds that push over dozens of trees are fairly common in these mountains, so that's all I thought the storm was. This particular tornado seems to have formed and dissipated several times based on the damage: it came down a mountain and crossed the Allegheny where it destroyed a lumberyard then climbed over another mountain doing minimal tree damage, then fell back to the valley where we live. Here it took down some trees and power lines and damaged but did not destroy several buildings. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Three years ago an F1 tornado followed a similar route where there is a gap in the mountains that apparently aids in their formation.

Abortion..my spin..a letter to the editor

 

   “Globally from 2010 through 2014, 35 abortions were performed per 1,000 women of reproductive age, down from 40 abortions per 1,000 women. The decrease was driven primarily by reductions in countries with liberal abortion laws, where abortion rates dropped from 46 per 1,000 women to 27. Conversely, developing regions – including 93 percent of the countries with the most restrictive abortion laws – saw only a drop from 39 to 36 abortions per 1,000 women…The data show that, while stricter abortion laws do not lead to fewer abortions, preventing unwanted pregnancies has a significant effect on reducing the number of terminations…In countries where laws permit abortion only to save the life of the mother, the abortion rate is higher at 37 per 1,000 women than the rate of 34 abortions per 1,000 in countries without such restrictions…In 2018 abortions in the United States hit an all time low.”
      Effective contraception is the most effective deterrent to having to confront the difficult decision to abort or not, and the education and social status of women in developed countries better empowers them to control their pregnancies. Ideally, if an unwanted baby is born, and the mother does not offer it for adoption, that mother has both the emotional and financial support to raise the child in a loving, supportive environment. If not, then the moral question of aborting a fetus becomes the question of assuring that a child does not suffer from neglect-or worse. In the United States, there are public safety nets to assist needy mothers, yet far more money is spent on weapons and conflicts financed by American tax dollars. Hopefully, some of the outrage against killing unborn babies is being channeled into stopping American supported violence that kills innocent children around the world. All unnecessary killing should be avoided.
     When discussing the sanctity of life, it is common for people to assume that human life is the most precious. After all, we are human and have an inherent bias towards our own species. From a larger, historical perspective, Nature does not assume that our species has a privileged position over other species; extinction has been a normal part of lifes history. So for as much as we like to believe that we are special, with a little empathy and an inclusive vision, it is easy to value other species as having a similar right to life as a human fetus. But over population and resource depletion by humanity are slowly causing the next mass extinction-perhaps including ourselves-so from that perspective it is hard to argue the moral high ground regarding human fetuses. Again, all unnecessary killing should be avoided.
  In any case, the decision to abort a child is a difficult one for every woman, and to condense the complexities of that decision to a dogmatic religious doctrine oversimplifies their emotional turmoil. Is to choose life a preferable, positive choice? No doubt, but the perspectives leading to that choice demand that compassion for pregnant mothers is included in the discussion.

One Monument

   The book "THE MASTER PLAN" by ex convict Chris Wilson did more to clarify the black experience as related to the justice system than any other source I have ever seen. He is a better man than most of us and I encourage everyone to read it. Along those lines...

Beth and I recently returned from a 3 week journey to the south, where we encountered this racist monument in the town of Madison, Georgia. To be fair it was erected in 1908 and overall we found the people of the south to be very friendly and courteous. They are, however, still fighting the civil war in some places and seem to have missed the larger point that preserving the “sovereignty” of their way of life meant preserving the abominable immorality of slavery. And I would like to remind those black people who still harbor resentment towards whites that the battle of Spotsylvania courthouse alone-among many others- and particularly the sacrifices at the ‘bloody angle’ show that many white men offered their lives to help right the wrongs of their misguided brothers.

Another Good Book, etc

     In addition to my standard comment "it's all crap" regarding the bureaucracies and inefficiencies of modern life, I also say "well, people don't farm anymore, so what are they supposed to do?"
     This book offers a detailed analysis of why modern society has become the way it is and why 37% of people say that what they do is meaningless-hence the title of the book. Bullshit jobs are jobs that if they disappeared, no one would really notice, and include mostly white collar paper pushing administrative type vocations that have proliferated in the last 30 to 50 years. Mr. Obama gave this informative description of them while formulating the Affordable Care Act:
      " Everybody who supports single-payer health care says,

  'Look at all the money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork'. That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people who are working at Blue Cross, Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
        Which, as author Graeber ( a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics)  states, is precisely why the present inefficient system was/is maintained...Because to some decision makers it is "better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do."    (...like I said...nobody farms anymore..)
       Personally, I have always thought the farmers and plumbers and child care givers and all the genuine Workers in a society should be the highest paid, because what they do has the highest value. If all of the 'illegal' immigrants were deported, society would quickly notice the lack of food, housing, clean hotel rooms.etc etc.. In "Anti-Clock" I wrote that the true worth of manual labor is revealed when it's time to move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs. No lawyer or doctor or banker or writer will be of much help then, or when the electricity goes out. .This book helps explain how priorities have gotten so skewed.
          At any rate...one example of a job that is Not bullshit is a dentist, because one can directly see the productivity. I had a broken, infected tooth pulled last week, the first in my life. My reasoning at age 63 is that saving some of them with root canals and crowns no longer makes economic sense.