Here is tonight’s moon, beautiful as always.
My mother died on November 4th after a protracted year long battle with lung cancer – she expired at home with family surrounding her, and the end was not painful as we were using hospice services for palliative care. In the end it wasn’t the cancer that killed her, but rather the pneumonia that the tumors pressing her air passages closed encouraged.
She was the woman who performed dramatic readings of Edgar Allen Poe poems and who read “A Stitch in Time” to me… and I miss her dearly.
Her death is one reason I have zero beef with the proposed new graphic warning labels on cigarette packs; for in the end all of the conservative catechisms about “everything causing cancer” and other cantrips that downplay the probabilities of cigarette carcinogens killing you did nothing for her. I recommend to all of my friends and family to stop smoking right now if you are.
In a few bouts of manic energy interspersed among the pain we did manage to finish the back patio, and now we will move on to building a retaining wall for the flowerbeds in front which are sagging downhill.
The past year things have dimmed but now that mom’s pain and ours has passed, color is returning to a world that was somewhat gray. There are still moments but now there is once more a future to plan as best we can for the rest of us.
Here’s Kasey taking a break from patrolling the fence and catching some rays of the Autumn sun at Dad’s house.
E’er a leaf goes astray into the street it will wander.
Thus it is written, thus shall it ever be.
E’er the wind blows a leaf, down the lane it will fly.
Thus it is written, thus it shall ever be.
E’er a leaf flies down the lane, in my yard will it lay.
Thus it is written, thus it shall ever be.
Normally I wouldn’t post something from Keith since he’s sorta like the left’s Glenn Beck lite in the hyperbole department, but nobody else has collected all of the craziness from the Tea Party candidates in one spot. Once you watch this you won’t wonder anymore why the Tea Partiers are dodging the media at all costs. I trimmed the intro a wee bit so you can get to the red meat right away.
For the record I am one of those abandoned Republicans, now registered Democrat for the first time in my life.
Juan Williams, purportedly a news analyst, expressed an irrational fear on the Bill O’Reilly show while trying to back up Bill’s Muslim bashing recently on The View. The fact that Juan expressed a fear is not the problem, the fact that he might have offended people is not the problem — rather it’s the act of expressing an irrational fear and not explaining that it’s irrational or downplaying the puerile instinct that’s the real problem. *
Juan still got on the plane – if the fear was rational, then should Juan have gotten on the plane? Yet Juan did get on the planes, as do we all. Whenever you have fears it’s pretty childish not to examine them objectively – and it’s also childish not to recognize which are reality based, and which are unreasonable. As a news analyst if you must use your own anecdotal emotions then it’s a pretty heinous journalistic omission to express base fears about large groups of people without objectively analyzing them and realistically explaining them away. By not doing so, Juan communicated that it’s A-ok to fear other religions, which is pretty un-American if you read our Constitution.
Juan has confused his momentary xenophobic pangs with real news — it’s obnoxious at minimum, and dangerous if it ever becomes the norm. Of course that will fit right in with the fear and loathing factory of our times that promptly hired Juan after he was fired, Fox News.
* We all have some immediate base fears developed in our long social evolution as a species; one of them is that any out-group generates fear on sight but those fears are easy to overcome, just as fear of falling and fear of fast motion is easily overcome by anyone who has learned to ride a bike. Most of these old evolutionary twinges are very quickly mediated by higher social and hierarchical judgment centers in our fore brains. When a journalist fails to do that and further fails to explain that the fear is not rational, then you have to wonder about the journalist’s motives in mongering it.
We haven’t done more on the patio because the weather’s been cold, and I can’t walk so well with the nail hole in my foot. So the doc has me on antibiotics, and things are getting better. I was able to put a shoe on today for instance, however it’s been five days without my morning walk, and Kasey is starting to get mad.
We’ve got all the pavers down and now just have to fill a 2″ stripe between the outer edge pavers and the second row with concrete and something decorative. In the process I stepped on a board with a nail in it, and now my foot’s swollen. If it’s still bad in the am I will head in to the doctor’s office.
As stated in previous posts, I’m an atheist – I don’t believe in god(s) or the supernatural. Lack of belief is not the same as denying the possible existence of god(s) however, as Qualia Soup explains in the following excellent presentation. It sums up pretty well where I am at – I don’t care whether you believe or not, I don’t care which god(s) you believe in, I just can’t believe myself. Some consider me a militant atheist because I often point out the abuses of extremists who are religious, but to me it’s part of my job as a rational human to speak up when I see evil.
