How does Your Garden Grow? Do You Have any Bees?

My original idea was to frame this as a national inquiry into the health of bee populations in suburban and rural areas.  Surely colony collapse disorder must be associated with commercial beekeepers who hire out their hives to farmers in need of their services.  Because American farms use a plethora of dangerous and unhealthy pesticides, even produce that is labelled as organic may contain any one of as many as seventy-three chemical compounds commonly used to control pests and weeds.  I am extremely interested in the bee populations in your neck of the woods.  I am happy to report that the San Diego coastal palisades remain host to European Honeybees, Bumblebees and Carpenter Bees.

Carpenter Bee

But, of course this is just a shameless gardening post.  My pride and joy are my Lipstick Hibiscus purchased from the Mission Hills Nursery founded in 1911 by Kate Sessions, presumably direct descendants of true Hawaiian stock.

Just as close to my heart remains my prized Arctostaphylos Manzanita Dr. Hurd, a northern California native.  It's the only Manzanita I can keep alive.  This is how it blooms in early January.

My wife refuses to believe that peaches won't grow near the coast.  Here is a picture from happier times.  Last night the local canyon racoons feasted on our ripe peaches and washed their dirty faces in our birdbath.

Tomatoes from seed.

Any pepper will turn red if allowed to ripen.  We grew Anaheim, Pasilla, Jalapeno and Serrano.

And of our beloved California natives, including the Holly-leaf Cherry and the prized White Sage, Mrs. Junior's favorite is the Mimulus.  However, she claims that this Hawaiian pink only occurs in cultivars.  The true natives are either golden or Indian paintbrush red.

She did promise her Dad that we would grow some corn, which was fine with me.  You can tell when the ears are pollenated when the silks turn red or brown.  Right now, they almost look big enough to sell.

Of course we didn't want the crows to get them, so I had to hire Screech the Owl to look after them.

And we could never support such a healthy ecosystem featuring lizards, red-headed finches, mockingbirds, morning doves and assorted migratory birds without two Retrievers to keep the cats at bay.

 Chauncey

William

It's easier than you might think to grow chives.

And just as easy to grow your own green onions. 

All under the watchful eyes of my new BFF, Pepito, the San Diego Alligator Lizard.

And my twenty-three year old California Fan Palm.  Washingtonia Filifera.

And now, your moment of Zen

Nothing in the cry
Of cicadas suggests they
Are about to die.

-Basho-

HONEY, I SHRUNK THE ELEPHANT

Click on image to enlarge and read.

RNC Chairman Reince Preibus appears poised and ready to ascend the bully pulpit and further shrink the GOP elephant into a pygmy-sized pachyderm. Story here:

GOP at war with CNN and NBC over Hillary Clinton TV projects

“Out of a sense of fairness and decency and in the interest of the political process and your company's reputation, I call on you to cancel this political ad masquerading as an unbiased production," Priebus declared, calling these productions “a thinly-veiled attempt at putting a thumb on the scales of the 2016 presidential election” in letters to CNN President Jeff Zucker and NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt.

What unleashed this tirade from the rancid proboscis of Reince Priebus? Last Friday, NBC announced plans to produce a four-hour biopic on Hillary Clinton, starring Diane Lane in the leading role. Two days later, CNN unveiled plans to produce a documentary on Mrs. Clinton, produced and directed by Charles Ferguson whose Oscar-winning film, Inside Job, exposed corruption in the financial services sector.  In response, Priebus threatened this boycott of CNN and NBC:

"If you have not agreed to pull this programming prior to the start of the RNC's Summer Meeting on August 14, I will seek a binding vote of the RNC stating that the committee will neither partner with you in 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates which you sponsor," Preibus wrote to the networks.

With Hillary’s candidacy undeclared and hypothetical as yet, GOP concerns are irrelevant due to the fact that Mrs. Clinton has been a public figure on the national stage since 1992 – as First Lady of the United States (1993-2001), as United States Senator from New York (2001-2009), and as Secretary of State in the Obama administration (2009-2013). In short, Hillary Clinton is the subject of living history, and there is no candidate within the ranks of the GOP who can match her stature.

Can Reince Priebus really be THAT desperate to dictate the news and bully the press in an effort to salvage his incredibly shrinking brand?  Give me a Hillary Show any day instead of reruns of the idiot circus comprising “6-6-6” Cain, “Oops” Perry, and “Frothy” Santorum.

EL PAPEL HA MUERTO?

The plastic palm at the end of the world

It's impossible to sum up American culture these days.  It's a farrago of barbarian freak chic, phony Euro faddism,  retro-futurism and gross slob-snobbery. That's only a sample, of course.  There are more sub-cultures, cults of style and lack thereof than I care to or can enumerate, but when a plain old cup of plain old coffee becomes an "Americano" even in the heart of America -- when Wendy's serves "Tuscan" hamburgers, when anything from dogfood to doughnuts, not made entirely by robots is "Artisinal" (and perhaps Tuscan as well) I might have to stop using the word culture at all and substitute circus, but for the fact that the large number of retired circus people and side show freaks in Florida are generally nice people and not given to parading around in "look at me" mode, unless of course they're getting paid for it.

Who the hell are we trying to fool but ourselves?  The waitress at the diner or Dunkin' Donuts or the Waffle House isn't any more a Barrista than a μπάρμαν  yet we've accepted that peremptory commercial intrusion unquestioningly as though it retroactively had been painted into the Nighthawks where the patrons were doubtless drinking "venti's" or Frappuchinos with hand harvested Madagascar Cinnamon -- free range, artisinal and fair trade, of course. In Germany they call it Barkeeper, In Paris and Madrid it's a barman, but English isn't good enough here.  You'd never order squid or snails and if you want Dolphin caught off Vero Beach, Florida, you'd better ask for it in Hawaiian, you uncouth American you.

Does the near universal phoniness and inept pretense indicate that Americans, for all their boasting and bravado really feel inferior?  Do we suspect that our commercialized, mechanized, industrial culture leaves us with an inchoate longing for authenticity that this same commercially manufactured culture is willing to provide in a chrome plated, sanitized, injection-molded and fake "Euro inspired" form?  Is it our American insecurity motivating our fashionably unshaven McEpicurians, Bourgeois bohemians, Natural Food and alternative medicine alchemists to seek out erzatz  authenticity and attach exotic names to our pedestrian lives and quotidian pursuits?  Is the white teenager with the shoes and baggy pants and rasta hat and the Kia Soul with "rims" really seeking the "authenticity" of not being middle class and white?

Come on, half the studded leather Bikers at Daytona Bike Week are dentists and accountants, pretending to live a life that wouldn't allow them to keep their Lexi and Audi-Doodys and suburban houses or to sip those 15 dollar artisinal Tuscan Latte's on their lunch breaks. How many of those red Ferraris on South beach are rented by the day and saved up for all year?  How many of the sad losers in those smoke filled casinos feel like high rollers when they toss the keys to their ten year old Hyundai or their leased Lexus to the valet ( or is it carrista now)? only to be made fools of by a beeping and hooting machine that just ate their Social Security check.

Yes, we'll raise hell with you if  you hint that we're not "number one" but I suspect we hate being Americans far more than the rest of the world hates us for being Americans. 

Developments in Iran

There's a little story out there which isn't getting a lot of play in the American press, possibly because the corollary to the journalistic axiom would be "if it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead." It's not a story of death, or destruction, or anything other than a possible hope for the future.

See, there's this country called Iran, and the Iranian president for the last eight years has been a fiery little Holocaust-denier named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now, a lot of people don't understand how little power (comparatively) the Iranian president has, but he does have a certain amount of influence, and Ahmadinejad is now out of office.

His replacement is a reform-minded moderate named Hassan Rouhani, who, from 2003 to 2005 under former President Mohammad Khatami, was chief nuclear negotiator with the European Union. He campaigned on promises to improve human rights in Iran, restore the economy, and improve relations with the West.

Now, there are certain factions in America (and Israel) who believe that it's in their best interests to keep stirring up fear of Iran, and who will never believe that there are peaceful Muslims - Fox "News," for example, is trying to spin him as a Smiling Warmonger on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.

One of the fears that the Islamophobic crowd wants to keep alive is the terror of a "nuclear Iran!" Because that would lead to immediate nuclear annihilation of Israel!

(Despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence that Iran has been building nuclear warheads, but that they have a history of "failure in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Safeguards Agreement... with respect to the reporting of nuclear material, its processing and its use, as well as the declaration of facilities where such material had been processed and stored...")

Despite the strident screams of the Rush Limbaugh's and Pam Geller's of the world, the White House today declared that they're willing to engage with Iran "to resolve the international community's deep concerns over Iran's nuclear program."

So, we might just be seeing the Middle East inching toward peace - expect the right wing to start pushing back against it as hard as they can.

Republican Obstruction and the Founding Fathers

I was reading some right wing article that made reference to Federalist paper #58.  This is one that I had never read, so I went to take a look at it.  I need hardly state that the content of this Federalist paper, written by James Madison, had absolutely nothing to do with the irrational point that the writer was trying to make.  However, at the end of Madison's essay, there was an amazing passage, which relates directly to the subversive, obstructionist behavior of the Republican party today.  Once again, they love to blab about the Constitution, without taking a moment to find out what it means.  Well, here is Madison.  I think you will find this interesting:

'It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision...In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences."

Do I need to state the relevance of this passage to today's situation in Congress?  Through misuse of legislative privileges (most notably the filibuster in the Senate) power has been effectively transferred to the minority, and what is more, with exactly the result predicted by Madison at the founding of our republic- an "interested minority- the very rich- have indeed screened themselves from "equitable sacrifices to the general weal," and have continuously extorted "unreasonable indulgences."

Could there be a more succinct and accurate portrayal of what has gone on in this country the last decade or so, as the Republican party has transformed itself into the party of subversion?  But of course, Republicans, who constantly manufacture opinions to put into the mouths of the founding fathers, have no interest in what the founding fathers, with considerable wisdom, foresaw.  All the Republican talk about "original intent" is, like most of what they have to say, nothing but noise intended to shout down reasonable and informed opinion, in their unstoppable zeal to extort "unreasonable indulgences" for the rich criminals who pay to keep them in office.

That's mainly what I have to say about this, but I can't let Madison go without reprinting what he says next:

"Lastly, it would facilitate and foster the baneful practice of secessions...a practice subversive of all the principles of order and regular government; a practice which leads more directly to public convulsions, and the ruin of popular governments, than any other which has yet been displayed among us."

Once again, Madison proves prescient.  We have seen, the last few years, continuous threats by Republicans to secede, so confident are they in their divine right to rule the country, regardless of the outcome of elections.  As they dwindle more and more into a minor segment of the American people, and as their anger at their marginalization (which need never have happened, if they had not claimed superior rights for themselves all along) grows, their toying with the essential fabric of our country may very well bring about the "ruin of popular government," completing the job of wrecking the nation in the name of patriotism that they began in 1860.

Feline Friday

A Liliger Cub

All In The (Republican) Family

Remember Richard Nixon?  Richard who?  You know, the guy they tried to rehabilitate after he fled the White House behind his felonious VP and just ahead of the prosecutors, the guy they built a museum about with fake exhibits showing how he really was a great man who was victimized by the Liberal Press?

Well as long as we have Dick Nixon's words on tape we don't have to kick him around any more, since his unique talent for kicking himself in the ass with both feet in his mouth relieves us of the burden.

Watching All in the Family and completely failing to get what it was about, all the trickster could get out of it is that it "glorified homosexuality" made a hippie out to be a better man than a "hard-hat" and was likely to destroy America.  CNN plans to air this clip and more Nixon outrages tonight.  I don't plan to watch it.  I don't need to listen to this shitweasel, this piece of snake dung talking about how Rome and Greece were destroyed by "fags."  I had enough many years ago when I heard him talking to Billy Graham about how the Jews were destroying America.  I've had far more than enough of the party that supported him for decades, that attacked truth and justice to protect this horror, committed crimes to re-elect him and who now thinks he's way too far to the left for the modern tea-stained Republicans.

Watch this (my apologies for the ad) and ask yourself how this piece of human garbage ever got elected, how anyone would debase themselves and their country by supporting him in full knowledge of his words and deeds.  Ask yourself how low a person has to be to be a Republican.  Listen to his words America, and despair.

A shot in the dark

15 of them actually.

Well isn't that special -- or maybe not.  We will have to wait and see if  this shooting of an unarmed black man at night in his mother's driveway, (and in Florida no less,) will have Al Sharpton inter alia out in the streets demanding justice and the media yelling about wake up calls and demanding that we revoke the right of the police to carry guns or defend themselves with them.

Roy Middleton took two or three steps out to his car, parked in a carport set way back from the street  to get some cigarettes at two O'clock of a Florida morning.  Fumbling around in the dark, he heard invisible voices screaming, as police are wont to do, to put his hands up.  Thinking at first that it was a neighbor pulling his leg, he hesitated, but then complied, but police, thinking that anyone black and out at night  entering a car must be a thief, opened fire and shot him 15 times, according to a CNN report.  Oops.

Of course the official explanation is that he didn't comply with the shrieks, often obscene, often unintelligible that we so often hear during attempted arrests, that often confuse and stun people into momentary inaction particularly when they're in their homes or just outside their door or in their car or at 2 in the morning. There's nothing worse and little more deadly than a nanosecond's hesitation.

15 times, although police claim it was only 7.  Actually 2 hits out of  15 or even 7 at about ten yards is pretty damned poor, which indicates that either the officers were panicked or could hardly see well enough to tell a pack of cigarettes from a weapon.  Either way. . .

Mr. Middleton, says his mother, had been on pain pills for a back injury and perhaps that added to the normal 2:00 AM sluggishness -- perhaps not.  A next door neighbor says he thought Middleton was complying although he couldn't see clearly, but woe betide anyone, and anyone black in particular if he fails to instantaneously and abjectly prostrate himself  at the first shouted syllable from invisible voices in the dark of night - and even then.  15  times. There are bullet holes everywhere, but fortunately no bystanders were hit and fortunately for Mr. Middleton, none of the fusillade of bullets hit a vital area although he'll have to have reconstructive surgery on his leg as the bone was shattered. His car will need a few thousand in bodywork as well.

Perhaps as his elderly mother says, God saved him. Perhaps he has insurance. I hope so, so that his mother doesn't have to sell her house to pay for it because 'Obamacare" is still a long way off and Florida's Medicare Fraud governor is hell bent on ignoring it.

The sad thing is the frequency at which such things happen and a sadder thing is how often we never hear, or hearing once, we never hear again, like the case a few miles from my house where a cop shot a black man who after being deemed a suspicious character for being in a restaurant parking lot after closing time attempted to drive away and instead of perhaps shooting out a tire, the cop decided to kill the driver with a shot to the head.  In the last few months, I haven't seen or heard anything more about it and nobody seems to care because the media didn't see the chance to make a buck as they did with the Treyvon Martin case.

It remains to be seen what happens in Pensacola, but my money is on nothing. I'm betting that the self defense claim will be upheld, even though the Stand Your Ground legislation is as irrelevant here as it was in Sanford and perhaps because it's just as irrelevant and the media and the race baiters have already overplayed their hand.  If a local Florida newspaper poll has any relevance over 80% think that the Zimmerman verdict was justified because the prosecution could not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt that it was murder.

Reasonable doubt. Perhaps that alone is enough to make zealots angry, because after all, we all know who's guilty and who isn't because we've seen so many TV shows over the years.  You get a sixth sense, you know and isn't it better that every evil be punished even if some innocents happen to go to jail or to the execution chamber and even if minorities are over represented that way.  Contradiction?  Cognitive dissonance?  You bet, but passion and justice and caution and many other abstract terms don't play well together even if they make CNN fat and people like Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh and yes, Al Sharpton millionaires.

So will this be another "wake up call" which the "whole world is (but isn't) watching" despite riots, revolutions earthquakes and royal babies?  Will there be crowds accusing the Pensacola Police of  hunting black people for sport?  Will the parents and wives of these cops be getting death threats like the parents and family of George Zimmerman are getting?   I think not, although this should be worth more than the slight mention it's getting in the press, but then I've heard countless cases as bad and worse and I've seen them fade away.  History has made me a cynic. What about you?