Words and pictures exposed to light. A space of notions, impressions and breezes. Text and photography by Tom.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Perspective
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Shades of Gray
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Bad Never Ends Well
- In just six years, the IG has tallied at least $17 billion in questionable spending. This includes $3.6 billion in outright waste, projects teetering on the brink of waste, or projects that can’t — or won’t — be sustained by the Afghans, as well as an additional $13.5 billion that the average taxpayer might easily judge to be waste. Exhibit A for “You be the judge”: $8.4 billion was spent on counter-narcotics programs that were so ineffective that Afghanistan has produced record levels of heroin — more than it did before the war started.
Thursday, August 12, 2021
Heavy Lifting in Tomorrow Land
You can understand if they, anyone under 30, want to toss us over. We have certainly handicapped their future.
You can understand why we might want to toss over some of us. We, collectively humankind, have blown it, in more ways than we care to enumerate.
Some of us began with concern and then warnings. Some of us heard the siren and began fumbling toward correction. Some of us nailed down the science and heightened the alarm. Some of us got more serious, more ardent, more engaged and it is precisely there, on this front line between knowledge and action where "we" became frayed and then undone. We became a DMZ between foresight and negligence, between us and them, though we are all players in the dirty deal.
The planet had science, and then big money bought some of it. When scientists told an oil company decades ago fossil fuels were killing the planet and that meant ocean levels were rising, they decided to raise the level of their drilling platforms and keep the dark secret as a gift for their descendants.
The UN Red Warning for Planet Earth confirms what we had been told, tells us it is worse than we knew, and it is an indictment for all of us. We are all guilty of this crime; those of us who worried about the science and tried to make changes, those of us who knew the science and kept on doing business as normal, those of us who "knew in our hearts" we were doing a slow motion dance with death but still relied on legal and political means to make change, and those of us who put wealth and profit above all else! The power was in the big money and they bought lobbyists and congressmen and senators and wrote laws that were phony and ineffective.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
DELUSION IN AMERICA
The scenes are hauntingly reminiscent, shutter flashes of a pre-millennium sci-fi or political thriller, too absurd to believe. But here we are, witnesses to a dystopian undoing of our own world view and all that we have believed about democracy and the American way.
Truth is set aside. Delusion becomes contagion. They would rather die than take a vaccine. They've become a Reich, wrecking a Republic. A tidal rise of insanity, a time of vultures.
Sunday, July 4, 2021
An American Lamentation and A Toast!
In the light of freedom from monkhood and the glow of returning to friends and work and life in a nation under a steady hand, we see the enemy amongst us.
It is telling the vaccinated can live with assurance, but 30% of the nation will continue to die and suffer because they remain unvaccinated.
Two and half centuries of commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, following our revolution against despotism, finds us divided and challenged by a fifth column that no longer hides.
We have become more divided and more ignorant.
Gaining power is the sole principle of Republicans and they employ lies, insurrection, voter suppression and the abandonment of oaths.
We can thank the "Natures God" affirmed in the Declaration, and sworn to in oaths of office, there are more Americans committed to democracy. The majority has the capacity to limit the rise of the aggressive fascist, but "they" have become adept at minority "rule."
Here's another piece of Americana-summer gardening.
You've read here before of our love of fava beans and Lana's considerable labor with them. Case in point..the bowl on the left are the pods, the middle bowl, the inner husk or shell* and on the far right, the bean. The artichokes are from one of our raised beds and another early summer crop.
*It's a matter of test about getting rid of the inner husk. I think they add a little flavor. Lana prefers them gone. Here's a secret, I used them, still in the husk, in a recent dish, and she didn't notice, or at least object!