Thoughts and prayers? Fill in the blanks

One day the #fakepresident says the press is the enemy of the people. The next day some asshat
shoots up a newsroom killing five people. To which the #fakepresident tweets:

Verified account

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing Wisconsin, I was briefed on the shooting at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

You can only imagine what he said aside to his cohorts who encourage his constant assaults on the #fakenews, #failingnewyorktimes, #criminalCNN and every other shot he has taken at the news media. Perhaps we will hear it from him in a tweet overnight.

Here's what I think of that:

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing xxxx, I was briefed on the shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing xxxx, I was briefed on the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing xxxxx, I was briefed on the shooting at the Pulse in Orlando Florida. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing xxxx, I was briefed on the 154 mass shootings in the United States this year. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

Do you get the picture? Fill in the blanks for tomorrow's headline:

@reealDonaldTrump: Prior to departing ___________, I was briefed on the shooting at _____________ in _____________. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First Responders who are currently on the scene.

Last Friday the #fakepresident was at some sort of ceremony for the families of 11 people supposedly killed by immigrants illegally in this country. Eleven. He signed large pictures of the victims and used the occasion to continue his assault on folks crossing border so he can separate their families and hide their children as if the perpetrators of these crimes constituted the majority of the people seeking refuge. I don't remember and thoughts and prayers for these 11 people, at least until it is politically advantageous (he thinks) to parade their families in front of the whole country in order to convince us his immigration policies are just.

With sincere sympathy for those 11 families, I wonder how big a stadium he would need to bring out the families of people killed by mass shooters just since he took office. Yet there is no concern from the administration for those people .

No, instead of that a Stoneman Douglas student sees his home surrounded by police in a SWAT prank. An articulate student is vilified with every insult you can imagine hateful people coming up with for a high school girl who shaves her head. No thoughts and prayers there. And no action. But of course the overwhelming majority of those shooters are white American males, the same group whose families are based among the immigrant people and include the #fakepresident himself.

Gawd I am sick of thinking about this stuff, let alone writing about it. In the late of the evening as the fascism shroud pulled over the land he reached for the whiskey.

You can see me, but I'm not here

     All my life on many occasions, my mind has slipped away into some thought dream or reverie. At times it has gotten me into trouble; just yesterday I almost slammed into a slow-moving vehicle on a 55-mph road, I mean stand-on-the brakes almost. At other times it has been a great source of creativity. There was a time I spent throwing heads onto 396 and 427 cubic inch Chevy engines while a partner on the other side of the line did the same. One night he leaned over and asked "Where are you, Tim."
     With no thought at all I responded, "I'm in Montana herding sheep." And, in my head I was. He just said "cool" as if it were as normal as standing in a factory lifting 86-pound cylinder heads twice at a rate of around 100 an hour. He was probably off somewhere himself in this mindless job we had.
     Well, yesterday it happened during physical therapy. Yes, I am still recovering from last winter at the East Pole. (I just noticed, even after three glasses of wine I can type and spell better than the #fakepresident.) Anyway, I have developed a rapport with my main therapist. Several times early on while he was massaging my damaged shoulder he asked me why I was smiling. I finally explained sometimes I drift off into my mind and go places. That was OK with him, he actually kind of joked about it in a friendly way while I took some refuge in the excuse that it's about writing. One day I heard him tell another therapist,"he smiles and I have no idea where he is any more."
     So, yesterday I went in at noon instead of my regular time which meant I had to deal with three therapists instead of one because I was the only patient in the place.
     All friendly and cool, by the way, but the one woman was the primary for a while. I had only worked with her once before. I was doing some stretches with an elastic band, pulling it across my body at about stomach level. Over time I had learned you need perfect posture to do these things, body straight up, arms bent at the elbow at 90 degrees, shoulders relaxed. For this exercise to be effective, you need to maintain that but it's so easy to hunch your shoulders to pull that damned elastic stuff. I have graduated from light blue to pink and now orange, each of which takes a little more effort to pull.
     Anyway all three of them are watching me and my mind is taking off. Often I caught myself and fixed my shoulders which was always the biggest deviance I made from what they wanted.
Almost exasperated, the woman said once more to straighten my shoulders. I looked her straight in the eyes and then the other guy, and I said, "You have to understand, I am not always here."
     The usual therapist, who was doing some computer work behind the other two, laughed out loud. "That's true," he said, "I see him smile and I have no idea what's going on there, where he is."
     I looked at the woman who had been watching me and shrugged my shoulders to which she said, "that's it, now keep it up."

Accidental garden

No idea what this is, pretty sure it's a flower.

From experience, these are probably
sunflowers spilled from feeders.

For lack of a better excuse as I considered not planting a garden this year, I convinced myself I needed to let the

Does clover grow this tall?

Perennial lettuce.

raised boxes and other plots go fallow for a year to let them rejuvenate. I covered the soil in the four raised boxes after raking in a layer of compost, then garden cloth to prevent excessive weed growth.

Weeds or flowers?

For the largest plot, the 8x35 stretch along the front of the house I chose to leave it open and planned to go through it for weeds occasionally. Dealing with weeds around here is mindful of cartoon coyote mother trying to control five pups. When she has four pinned down a fifth one walks in. She lets go of one pup and two others escape while she grabs the fifth. As she goes along it looks like a four-footed version of wack-a-mole.

Some flower from last year.

They popped up everywhere and are now pretty much out of control out there mocking me every time I look out the window.

But among the weeds there have come up some surprises, plants that look like they belong in a garden and except for two I have no idea what they are. That's what the pictures are.

I did plant the long box out by the road with potatoes and the first ones popped up in the last day or so.

Potato finally poking through.

Meanwhile as I tackle weeds, now I have to be careful not to wack out a plant I want to see. Gardening in Alaska, what a trip. The people on the Mat-Su gardening facebook page I follow who take it all so seriously don't have nearly the fun I have. But then, they seem to have greater success in actually growing what they want to grow. They probably eat better, too.

I guess it all depends on what you consider success.

And of course there are the wild roses.

More Alaska garden stories

When good people do nothing

In college my minor was political science. Despite what some folks may think of liberal

college education I came out of that with the idealized concept of Congress and especially the Senate as arbiters and leaders and, yes, statesmen at the national and international level. Imagine the shock of realization that they saw their jobs as selfishly channeling as much federal money as possible into their own districts.

Alaska's gang proved particularly adept at that. While they connived to extract every possible dollar out of the federal government into something for Alaska, they mostly voted along the lines of whatever party they thought they represented, statesmanship be damned, morality too.

But the evolution didn't stop there. In the years that followed that first lucid non-idealistic awareness, the representation changed to what exists now, where they represent not the people, barely their own districts anymore and now represent the monied interests of the country, legislating for huge corporations and ultra rich barons who in turn fund the campaigns that keep the people who represent them in power while they rake in huge profits and impoverish their own employees.

And the nation has blithely followed along. A noisy ignorant plurality of Americans vote against their own interests because of the manufactured fears along religious, racial and patriotic lines. Their rulers twist every negative issue to keep those fears alive. A football player kneels during the national anthem to bring attention to the racism in this country and is vilified for disrespect to the anthem and the flag and the autocrats silence the original message in a cacophony of patriotic shouting.

We even shrug off the massacre of our children by gun-toting maniacs, while those supposedly representing the masses, actually only represent a well funded- organization that represents gun manufacturers and uses their money to influence those public representatives.

We cruelly separate children from their parents in the fear of too many brown people coming into the country. Meanwhile crops die in the fields because no red-blooded American wants to pick them — that's menial labor always done by those same people we are now sending back to their own countries to be murdered while their children languish in fear behind the wires of what can only be called concentration camps.

And what does a large segment of that coalition of the rich whose whole existence is based on the moral of "love thy neighbor" do? Nothing. Nada. Oh yeah one of them pleaded with his followers to provide him with enough money to buy an $80 million private jet airplane. Maybe that would bring him closer to god, because nothing he does on terra firma is going to if the teachings are correct. The rest could care less as they worship in billion-dollar cathedrals, the kind Jesus and Sampson tried to tear down.
An for crying out loud we have to teach our children how to stay alive when someone starts shooting up their schools. Is there anything imaginably worse than that?

There are so many instances where the oligarchy has mistreated the people who support it with their labor and their acquiescence, they can't all be listed in a single polemic that anyone would read.

It has caused a national malaise, a sort of background depression that comes to the fore every so often when the #fakepresident that ignorant plurality elected does something so outrageous we almost can't believe it. Consider this as a prime example. That #fakepresident is about to attend a historic meeting with the dictator of North Korea. This has not been done since Korea was left divided by a hot war and then a cold war since the 1950s, with a history dating into the mid 1800s. What does this #fakepresident say and do with that for background? He says he doesn't need to and won't do any preparations for the meeting. He will "read" his counterpart and that is all he needs. What could go wrong with that? Yet we shrug our shoulders and pass it off as "well that's Trump." Then we wait anxiously to see how what outrage he commits this time.

The question is what is the next step in that progression of the evolution by government representation in this country? All of the options except one are almost unthinkable. Photographs of children behind chain link in America today raise too-vivid parallels to those photos we have seen in history books of children in their striped outfits staring out from behind barbed wire in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Are we going to keep shrugging our shoulders and letting it happen? That's what Germans did in the years leading to that great war

That one option is out there, but when 67 percent of those eligible fail to vote even in a presidential election, what hope is there? It can be changed but it is going to take an effort, even if it is only to take an hour out of our precious lives to vote in November, while we are still allowed to vote. The alternative is unthinkable. If we are going to act in fear let's make sure we fear the right thing. The longer we let it go on, the longer it's going to take to repair the damage.
Here's a start. This summer students who started the March for our Lives movement after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High school in Parkland, Florida, are taking a bus tour to register young people to vote. They plan to visit 20 states with more than 50 stops and also every congressional district in Florida. The first stop is June 15 in Chicago. They are targeting the four million people who will turn 18 this year. Now there's a voting bloc.
And take heart, things like this worked once before:


MORE POLITICAL COMMENT

Musings from the interweb

I haven't done this in a couple of years but today it looked like fun, so here goes, A roundup of interesting tidbits gleaned from social media along with some random comments of my own.

First of all that Meadow Lakes snake who got loose in Alaska a year ago, today tweeted a photo of a new part to be used in an emergency but doubtful you could find one in the winter when it would be needed. For those of you who don't recognize what's going on, that's a snake wrapped around the pulleys for the belt that powers a snowmachine.  Snakes on the tundra   @meadowlakesnake on Twitter.

 A kid in Kentucky giving his high school valedictory speech attributed this quote to Donald Trump: "Don't just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table." The crowd cheered. Then he said, "just kidding," and revealed it was a quote from Barack Obama. The crowd went silent and there were even a few boos. Racist much?

And while we're in Kentucky, one of the products targeted by Canada's retaliation for Trump's tariffs and aimed specifically at powerful supporters of Trump, was, well, Kentucky bourbon. Wonder who that's aimed at. They also went after cucumbers, a large crop in Paul Ryan's district in Wisconsin along with lawnmowers which sounds strange until you realize Toro industries, one of the world's largest manufacturers of such machines is headquartered in Wisconsin. Twofer: Ryan and that governor, Scott Walker.

NASA's planet-hunting TESS satellite sent back its first image, a swatch of the sky that includes more than 200,000 stars. NASA photo

It seems to me in order to be pardoned one first has to commit a crime, be tried and convicted and sentenced. Does that mean an assertion of the ability to pardon oneself is a declaration of guilt? Asking for a friend.

Amidst the low level of outrage over discovering almost 5,000 people died in THE US TERRITORY of Puerto Rico during the hurricane last fall, Elon Musk pointed out Tesla has "about 11,000 energy projects" going on there.

Firefighters are attacking a wildfire not too far from the East Pole today. It's 40 miles northeast of

Talkeetna. The cabin at the Pole is 12 miles due east of town. Keeping an eye on that one.  The fire had burned only about 3-5 acres when discovered but was threatening a hunting lodge and two cabins.

The Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles were uninvited by the White House for the usual presidential ceremony because "some members refused to attend." It was noted none of the Eagles ever took a knee for the national anthem last season.

It seems like everybody in Alaska except me has a picture like this one of what's going on in their yards. Taken by Carol Hushower in Palmer. (moose pic)

‎This is the kind of help-wanted ad you find in Alaska:

 Torben Metzner‎ to Alaska Mushing News

HANDLER WANTED ...

Dogsledding company in Kiruna – Sweden is looking for one more handler, saison 2018/2019. Starts October 2018 ends April 2019.

Becky Hammon reportedly is the first woman to interview for the head coaching job with a National Basketball Association team — San Antonio Spurs. For the record she played on two WBA teams and has been an assistant coach in San Antonio for the past four years.

Bill Gates says he should be taxed at a higher rate.

Gun violence is a women's issue, too. 

For the second month in a row, the state of Alaska collected a million dollars in marijuana sales taxes.

This was my favorite meme of the week. (so far :)

And this from Prince William Sound Science Center. Nice to see some happy kids."Our first camp of the summer was so much fun. Six adventure girls took on Cordova to learn about rainforests, glaciers, the ocean, wetlands, and how everything is connected, We learned a lot, played even more, and had the most incredible time. Did you know flubber is a great way to explore how glaciers move?

Siri, we need to talk

A screen grab from the Ring camera. That's me in the center toward the top, I think trying to dig out my phone.

A bright sunny day today and time to get out in the yard and do something. I suited up including all the new supports I have to wear on my elbows and shoulder and headed out. Then I decided to try something new and I plugged my earbuds into the iPhone and started a playlist. Ever so cool, though if any neighbors were in earshot they probably wondered what fool was singing Lady Gaga songs out loud in the neighborhood.
     First I watered the one raised garden where I planted potatoes. I didn't feel much like gardening this year so I convinced myself it was good to leave all the other ones fallow for a year to regenerate. From way back in my teens I think I knew farmers did this as they rotated crops.
     That done I went about organizing the wood piles. With all the blowdowns, I have some newer wood on top of older and I started flipping them, taking out the old stuff, stacking the new and then stacking the old on top. That was fun for a while but there is more to do.
    All the while, every so often the music would drop to barely a whisper for a few seconds. I kept checking the connection and the screen and everything seemed all right, but a mystery. Then I realized every time I walked around and activated the motion detecting security light, which depends on WiFi to communicate, it dimmed the music as it sent its message. Ain't technology grand?
     Anyway when I gave up on the wood pile for a while, I thought it would be a good day to take the four-wheeler and the trailer down the street to a pile of compost/straw-manure my neighbors leave out for the taking. They raise chickens and alpacas so it's a good fertilizing mix. My thought was to spread it on those fallow raised beds and let it soak in for a year. Mind you it seems like I have shoveled my share of manure over the years from Western New York dairy farms to Alaska dog lots and I had to laugh, here I was at my advanced age doing it again. But this time I had music.
     A couple of times the phone fell out of my shirt pocket so I jammed it into a deep pants pocket. Another thing you have to love Carhartts for — deep pockets.
    A few minutes later the music stopped and I heard some sort of ringing from the phone. I was alone and anticipating how slow and difficult extracting the phone from that deep pocket I said "oh fuck."
     Then I heard a voice coming from may pocket say "you don't have to talk to me like that." I assumed I had opened the connection with whoever was calling me and swore again.
     But, when I finally dragged the phone out it was only a message from Siri which printed out on my screen read, "There is no reason for language like that." Good grief, after a lifetime of cursing, my phone tells me to stop?
     And that's why Siri and I need to have a good long talk if we are ever to get along. I can't just turn it off either because for some reason Siri needs to be activated for my phone to communicate with my truck. I think it is a safety measure making you speak your desires rather than get distracted pushing buttons. I want to tell them it's not that safe if you are screaming in blind anger at your vehicle, either. I hope Siri and I can work this out.