SmokeSound

Of course we are spending money foolishly!  We are engaged in two wars, and ought to get out of them as soon as we can! We are spending money foolishly on our health care system; not on health care , but the system we use to deliver it!  Everybody knows that a single-payer system, a non-profit system--delivers health care much, much more inexpensively than insurance-company, for-profit systems do.  More:  we have laws that forbid government to buy drugs at as low a cost as it can.  "Not fair!", the drug companies say.  Not fair?  When did buying in quantity to obtain the best price become "not fair"? How did our tax code become the upside-down system it is?  It became so because we convinced ourselves that if we concentrate the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few at the top, everybody will be better off. Even some of the few at the top agree that what we have is neither fair, nor sensible.  We need to rewrite the tax code to simpl...

After coffee at the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe, Mari and I decided to check out Minnehaha Creek and the Lake level, and first thing you know, we found ourselves at The Turtle Bread Company. A rather stout woman, at the next table was wearing a shirt that caused me to remember something else.  Her T-shirt read, "Property of Jesus".   I remembered that when Luther College built an auditorium for musical and theatrical performances, and for large convocations, they explained that it would also be used for daily chapel services, and for its student congregation on Sundays.  They called it, The Center for Faith and Life:  the CFL. Zealous types argued that the large, more-horizontal-than-vertical building should have a cross on top, just like a church.  The architect hesitated, but finally relented, and soon the CFL had an architecturally compatible cross up on top.  The same zeal has turned every church door and window in the country into an opportunity fo...

Our closest grocery store is one of those very nice places that even has its own store magazine with helpful tips and explanations about how they found the best pickles in a small village in Poland.  Or maybe it was Fresno.  It is just a way to assure us that we are getting better food than at--Sniff!--the Big Box with lower prices. It is July--late July--and the newest magazine is on the rack, with a cover story about The Well-Planned Thanksgiving Dinner. Huh? Even Macy's Christmas Parade does not happen until almost Thanksgiving:  that's about a month early.  But, Good Grief!, this is late July!  August, September, October, November:  four months from now!  The turkey hasn't even hatched yet!  Are we supposed to buy turkey eggs and hatch them? I will wager that there is a form in the magazine for ordering the bird now.   Do you want a left-handed, or a right-handed, bird?  Should your cranberries come from a bog in . . . where ...

Nobody can accuse us, here in the U.S., of single-mindedness.  We are about as divided of mind as it is possible to get, short of pure madness. We call ourselves a two-party system, and we are, sort of.  That is part of the problem.  With only two parties, everything gets reduced to A or B, left or right, tax or spend, right or wrong.  The fact is that nothing is that simple. Even if it were that simple, we find ourselves with two parties well to the right of center.  Nobody knows where the liberals went.  No!  That is not quite right!  We know where Bernie Sanders of Vermont is, but he doesn't know where all the others went. It is even more hilarious than that.  (I use "hilarious" because if we cannot laugh at our self-mutilation, we will begin to weep at the injury.)  The Republicans are our conservatives, but they--the conservatives--have been ambushed by the Tea Party, which is so conservative it has trouble taking down the Naz...

I came out of the grocery store yesterday, and my glasses fogged up.  I stood there, halfway across the driveway, a bag in each hand, unable to see what was before me. I have had that happen in winter, going into a warm and humid building, but I do not recall such a summer blindness. Today I am going to the weatherman to have my eyes checked.

Yugoslavia was created during World War II, and held together by might and main.  Even the Soviet Union had trouble holding the six little nations together.  It didn't last.  Today there are seven where there had been six:  Bosnia and Herzogovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia plus Vojvodina, and Slovenia.  Tomorrow someone may get religion, or guns. The European model for nationhood is small, culturally uniform nations.  Poles here, French there, Greeks there.  During World War II, the Germans argued that Germany was wherever German was spoken, which meant that part of Germany was in Poland, and Austria, or France. Cultural diversity has had an easy time in Europe.  It has had a nearly impossible time within any nation in Europe. After World War II, Germany regained its juggernaut status, economically, but when it needed additional labor, it allowed in Turks, but called them, "Guest Workers".  They were not expected to...

"There's nothing more special than running out onto the field on Sunday morning, with your teammates, and knocking the crap out of people." .

Anders Behring Breivik built a bomb from chemical fertilizer, the way Timothy McVeigh did, and blew the hell out of a part of Oslo, Norway, the way Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City.  Breivik's lawyer says that his client is mentally ill. Mental illness isn't a plain thing.  It is usually just being a little too far out on the edge. Breivik ("Bry-veek") said and believed the kinds of things we hear people say every day.  He believed, apparently, that Norway should be a Christian nation, and that White people were somehow superior to other human beings or, at least, that Christians and Muslims did not belong in the same place. I am hoping that Glenn Beck does not have access to chemical fertilizers.  He says that those Norwegian kids who were shot were something like a Nazi youth movement during World War II.  It must be that he equates the Norwegian Labor Party with Nazis.  If Glenn Beck said that, as it is reported, he is insane, too. It is not ...

Once upon a year in Germany, while a student doing research, I learned--in order to survive impeccable German student logic--that working out the logic of an argument is a fine art, but that the art depends on what you assume in the first place.  Things follow from that.  If they follow badly, they are illogical.  Good logic is to understand the requirements of what is assumed in the first place.  That sounds pretentious!  It only means that, in an argument, the most important thing is to get clear about what is assumed in the first place.  Those things aren't logical.  They are "what-if"s.  Logic is just following the demands of what you assume.  Everything depends on "what-if"; on where you start. Start by assuming that it is a dog-eat-dog world!  You will move your way, logically, to some very rich, and some very poor, people, as a quite reasonable result.   Start by assuming that everyone should have a voice in what aff...

However much it damages our cheap jokes, we know that blonds are neither brighter nor more stupid than the rest of us unless, of course, they are artificial blonds.  Why would you want blond hair with dark roots?  Or black hair with gray roots?   We do know, don't we, that all terrorists are Muslim, probably with beards and brown eyes.  Except when they are blond and blue-eyed.  And maybe Norwegian.   Anders Behring Breivik just blew up a part of Oslo, Norway, and shot almost a hundred young people at a summer camp:  twice, when he could, just to make sure.  He hated Muslims, left-wing politicians, probably because they allowed brown-eyed, Muslim people to live in Norway.   I don't want to make clever comments about blonds or Muslims or fundamentalist religious people.  Another hundred people have died for ideology.  Thousands of Iraqis and Afganis and soldiers from around the world have done so, too.  It is enough to ...

A terrorist has just killed almost one hundred people at a youth camp in Norway, and seems to be responsible for having exploded a huge, Oklahoma City type bomb in the center of Oslo, shattering buildings, and killing even more. Norwegian newspapers say his name is Anders Behring Breivik.  He has been described as "very calm, shy, quiet, and polite".  He is reported to hate Muslims, and left-wing politicians. This is what a terrorist looks like:

"The eagle couldn't have picked a better person." Article by:  JON TEVLIN  , Star Tribune  Updated: June 25, 2011 - 11:37 PM.   Photo:  Frank Glick.

Religious communities are often contentious communities.  One might think that all those people dedicated to loving their neighbors might love their neighbors, and maybe they do, but they do not particularly love each other.  Protestants and Catholics in Europe fought bloody wars with each other.  Muslims in the Middle East blow each other up on religious grounds.  Orthodox and Reformed Jews could just as well be Sunni and Shiite Muslims.  Baptists are famous for dividing, and dividing, and scorning each other.  Lutherans are like Baptists, but with slow hymns and ponderous prayers.   A clergyman once advised me that when he had a particularly contentious church member, he asked him or her about three things:  1)  How is your health?  2)  How are things going at home?  3)  How's your job?  It usually really wasn't about who should mow the cemetery lawn, or whether the kids were learning about sex in Sunday School. ...

I have just spent perhaps half-an-hour outside our house, where I could hear the sirens better, and see the sky becoming a swirling dark space.  There is a severe thunderstorm going by.   What was much more moving than what I could see was what I heard.  It was never quiet.  At what was a distance of ten or fifteen miles, the sky was a constant threat.  The lightning bolts were infrequent, but the endless roll and rumble of thunder was impressive.  It never paused to inhale.  If that were God on Mt. Sinai, then Moses is carving out an entirely complete code of ethics, and innocence is going to become impossible.   So much for all that lovingkindness and milk of human kindness!  The sky is angry and unrelenting. The sky is so large, and my boat is so small!  It is just to the right of the trailer you see in the lower right corner of the picture, out of sight.  But keep an eye on the photo.  You might see it sail by!

Leading the nation, again!  It is just something we do, here in Minnesota.  It is plain that we simply cannot help ourselves, so we help others, by leading. Tiny Tim Pawlenty was our Governor until recently, when he decided that the nation needed him and his expertise as President.  Tim's area of expertise was convincing us that he knew what he was doing.  When he left office, we finally saw what he had been doing.  He had been getting us into debt.  About five billion dollars worth.   You see, Tim was opposed to raising taxes.  Tim was no dummy!  He knew we had bills to pay--loans, potholes, doctor's bills, an odd desire to keep warm and have enough to eat, maybe a retirement home--so he did what had to be done if you are opposed to paying your bills through taxes:  he borrowed the money.   He "borrowed" the money our schools were supposed to get.  He told the schools not to worry:  his word was as good as gold, ...

I will tell you why it takes years and years to train a proper priest; high school, and college, and seminary, and internships.  It takes time to sharpen the mind so that it can recognize a miracle when it sees one! Oh, I know there are denominations that ordain almost anybody who can memorize a few Bible verses, and get all lathered up about sin and degradation, but the major leaguers of the sin and salvation set aren't playing T-ball:  they are versed not only in John 3:16, but in history and literature and philosophy and science.  And miracles.  You have to be able to distinguish a miracle from a common fungus, for instance.   Right over the hill, here, down by the river side, at St. Augustine's, somebody dropped a communion wafer on the floor during the Mass. That is kind of a serious thing in a church that is accustomed to everyday miracles.  They picked up the wafer, of course, and put it in a very reverent little container with some water. ...

I am getting used to the idea of Our Belle, Michele Bachmann, becoming President of the United States.  After all, we have to have somebody!  And she would really like to do it.   What is taking a little more of getting used to--giving me serious pause, if you want the truth--is having Marcus Bachmann as First . . . Guy , I guess.   I know he can dance:  I have seen him do that.  And he knows how to take government subsidies.  There is that family farm in Wisconsin that has received about a quarter of a million dollars, and Marcus himself has a little business over in Stillwater that takes some of that barbaric government money to train counselors for his counseling business; you know, the one that prays the gay away when it gets too close.  It is one of those churchy things, about hating the sin but loving the sinner.  You get people who have those strange barbaric urges that almost make you dance, but if you drop to a knee, and pinch ...

The Gray Lady stands with a foot on each side of the river, ringed with enhanced lakes.  Even in summer, the rains come down--water seeking water--to wash their way to New Orleans.   We are opposed to climate change, here, in the Twin Cities.  We do not favor murderous thunderstorms and tornadoes.  We do not need days such as we are being promised for this weekend, nearly a hundred degrees, with a dew point up into the eighties.  We do not even favor these in-between, gray days, when everything loses its precision and clarity, and muddles off into fuzziness and blahs.   But we cope.  At least we do not have a dry heat.  When it warms up here, small rivers run down our backbones--water seeking water--on their way to New Orleans.

We put in at what I will call, Larson's Harbor, a way of saying it that is much neater than Larson's Harbor.  As a working man's version of a yacht harbor, it offers an inexpensive way to launch a boat.  Part of the dock at the ramp must have floated away during the forty day and nights of rain that only Noah and Larson survived. Michael was up from Tucson on a visit, and he, Carol, and lifelong friend, Chris, went down to the river in boats.  Last summer, when Michael visited, a nasty thunderstorm convinced us not to take the boat out.  This year, we had perfect weather. And I also had a new auxiliary motor to augment the little two-cylinder, diesel inboard.  Six snarling horsepower hung on the transom, for better maneuvering, for trawling, and for motor insurance. After following the advice of the expert who sold bait, we weaved back and forth around the points sticking into the river, and finding nothing, at first, pulled up to a restaurant for lunch. ...

Here is how it works:  Congress decides where to spend money; you know, a little war here, another there, a nice program to benefit drug companies, a little left-over subsidy to big oil companies because they are trying to hard to please and get members of Congress re-elected, some money for the poor suckers out of work.  That kind of thing. Then Congress calculates how much money the government has available:  not enough.  But members of Congress are not dummies.  In fact, they think we are.  So they cut taxes for the people and companies that make the most money.  "It will trickle down", they say, "and we will all get rich, and even with lower taxes government will have even more money!" It doesn't work that way, of course, but we have bought the bullshit, so we all say, "Yes!" The bills get really big, and the revenue doesn't keep up.  We have to borrow.  But we have an old fashioned law that says Congress has to agree to do what it...

I haul our mowers 150 miles to our cabin so that they can get flat tires.  I have done that twice, recently.  Now when I load the mowers, I take the tire pump, too. We have the cabin on the market, so I am more assiduous about mowing and accumulating flat tires than is usual.  If I do not attend to mowing, the tension between what is wild, and what is tended, blurs toward what is wild. As is often the case with rather long drives, when one does them regularly they become almost a welcome routine.  That is especially true after a long day of mowing.  I turned off the dirt road onto the first pavement and found myself behind seven antique tractors in splendid condition, seemingly headed toward Decorah, Iowa.  I enjoyed settling in at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, watching more old tractors come up over the hill behind me. At St. John's Church, the tractors turned left, and I right.  Turning toward Mabel, Minnesota, a mile or so later, another ca...

First she said that our Founding Fathers fought tirelessly to end slavery.  What made the fight so tireless was that they owned the slaves themselves. Now Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge to support marriage exclusively for admitted heterosexuals that laments how much better family life was for Black children under slavery than it has been since Barack Obama was elected President. You do remember, don't you, how slave children had both a slave daddy and a slave momma at home unless, of course, one of our Founders sold the parents separately?  And tirelessly? I cannot believe that Our Belle, Michele, is simply ignorant.  She isn't simple, although sometimes the ignorance shows through.  She supports marriage, of course, by insisting that gay people cannot have it.  And abortion is awful, too, even if the mother dies, instead, sometimes.  One has to value life!   Well, a person has to stand for something, doesn't she?  Even if her siste...

Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem.  That is a remarkable thing to say.  Government is the way we do things together.  To despise government is to reject our common life.   When we reject our life together, we are not really proposing to live in isolation.  There only a handful of horseless cowboys who want to live in a school bus in the woods in Idaho or Alaska.  It is probably a good solution:  cowboy and rusty school bus numbers fairly match.  The rest of us want roads and schools and running water.  We want good health care at the best possible prices.  We want national parks and fish in the lakes.  We want safe food.  We need to help each other when the river floods, and when tornadoes destroy the town.   Left alone, Exxon would earn twice as much as it does now, and Bernie Madoff would set up even grander Ponzi schemes.  Want to buy a miracle drug made from bees' knees, or one that will rot...

Our boat is out of winter storage, finally.  There was no hurry.  It has been raining ever since Noah beached the ark.   During the winter, we bought a small outboard motor to supplement the little inboard diesel, which drives the single screw.  A displacement boat with a prop, dead in the water, with the wind blowing, or the current running, is something like a bumper car, so our hope is that we can use the little outboard for maneuvering in marinas.   Today we took the boat to a lake, not far from here, just to put it in the water and determine the imaginary water line at the stern.  It is imaginary because the shape of the hull--something like that of a sail boat, puts the transom up in the air; not where it is on boats that are driven along on the surface. I had almost forgotten about the trailer.  It has surge brakes.  I brake the pickup, as usual, and the trailer, which has something like a telescoping tongue, slips forward a couple...

When I moved to Chicago, in 1964, the skies over Gary, Indiana--south and east of us along Lake Michigan--were orange from the crap spewing from their steel mills.  The State of Indiana was powerless to do anything about it, because the steel mills owned Gary and Indiana politicians.  Only when the Federal government began to insist on environmental regulations did the air begin to clear up.   Gary, Indiana was a steel town.  Pittsburgh was another steel town.  Detroit was an automotive town.  All of them, and more, were part of the industrial economy that began in England, and here, and in Germany, that powered the shift from agriculture to industry.   Then the steel mills moved to Korea, and China, and India, and almost everywhere where large numbers of unemployed agricultural workers had moved to cities looking for work, because the industrial revolution had made it possible for agriculture to substitute machines for human and animal labor. ...

Page 1, Los Angeles Times online, Sunday, July 2: " Minnesota becomes 1st state to shut down By Nicholas Riccardi Without no budget in place, state operations have largely ceased, halting paychecks and closing parks just before the holiday." Here we are, without no budget, without no clue, and without no grammar in place!   Why don't we just have a little Tea Party?