ZNet warning... Important to take care.....

Since these scams are on the rise, and you have to know to NEVER click on one of their links... I am Linking an article on ZDNet that is a trusted site for developers and others.  Mr. Z, thank you!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-security-new-bsod-scam-emerges-from-fake-tech-support-swamp/

Just another bump in the road....  as if we didn't have enough to worry about with Hackers encouraged by their obvious success rate.... just sayin'

Stay Safe.  

strangeness abounds....

I did a little poking around the internet for fun, Christmas gift ideas, you know, whatever....

Here's something that can curl your hair...  It's about email tracking cookies now being used above and beyond selling you "stuff".

Read about it here.

Maybe you can figure out how to clean up your inbox.  I'm too tired to try, since I send so few these days....

See you later. Maybe on Thursday... I'm still trying to figure out where "up" and "down" are.
Someone asked me, one of those little voices of an evening, "Elle, are you alright?"  I lied and told them yes.

I'm not going to BE alright anymore.  This Gong Show running the country will kill me if I'm not careful.. They sure as hell killed my kid.  She had been going to doctors for about two years because she knew something was WRONG, and getting lousy healthcare!

You see, the company she worked for had their own lousy coverage, so she wasn't eligible for ACA because the The Republicans had half way GUTTED the ACA by insisting that this clause would be included, and there was nothing that could be done about it!

LINK to Salon Article.  But if you look you can find pertinent articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times.  Be my guest.

"Well, if they would rather die, then let them do it, and decrease the surplus population"  Ebeneezer Scrooge would have been a Republican.  Want to bet me?  You'll lose!

Why should they care about us?  They "who would be obeyed" in the Washington DC set, and who are warming their Horses' Arses in the Senate, House and White House, have the best healthcare in the Nation, and it's all free!  And we pay for it.  How do you like them poison apples, friend?

State Department being gutted. Will we be left defenseless? Who knows?

Our so-called president is busily emptying out the State Department.  With as cozy as he appears to be with Russia, this just makes him look even more guilty, in my eyes, than he ever has.

Oddly, he has a whole "Cadre of Agency" from various places who are more than willing to forward what seems like an "agenda".  Can the Republican party not connect dots?  Can they not see what is happening?  We do not need or want a civil war here.  But we can't just roll over and play dead, either.

With this I end my involvement in the sad outrage.  I'm done.  I am just going to knit for the hospital where my daughter died.

She was one of the victims of the crap medical care that we have here in the US.  She didn't get help soon enough because the company had it's OWN medical coverage, which was woefully inadequate, but was a hack of the Affordable Care Act that the Republicans forced upon the legislation, that employees of companies who had their own medical plans in place would be ineligible.

The only reason she got any help at all was that she was too sick to work anymore, and had to quit her job because she thought it was killing her.  (Well, it turns out that it was.)
Anyway, this put her into the uninsured group, who were eligible, in California for Medicaid, and gave her the chance to finally get a test that could have saved her life, if only she had gotten it sooner......

So, if you have a stake in this game, wake up and fight.  We can't let this happen.  It's all the lives of our children we are fighting for.  Think of them ... THINK of them.

Chemical exposure.. Flint Michigan...Living Down Stream, Rolling Stone Article

I'm doing this post because weakening the EPA is not something that will be pretty.

We had good presidents from both parties who didn't do harm or weaken it but now we have another short sighted demagogue who puts quick profit above Earth systems that clean the air and water.  We can't afford to not pay attention and we must fight this.

Here is the article about Flint, Michigan, from The New York Times.  We should be mad as hell about this.  To me, this is about human rights.  And animal rights, too.   Dumping or burying toxic chemicals in the land or our water should be a crime.  The streams and rivers also get polluted.  My daughter found stream pollution in Santa Cruz.  This in a Locked, secret site.  

Water will carry deadly chemicals anywhere it percolates through the soil, which is just about everywhere.

Living Down Stream , The web page.  The book that spawned this page was a must read for environmentalists.

Rolling Stone article about Flint Michigan.  

Sorry about those pop up ads.  The Rolling Stone is a great publication, but it's got to live. So,  I accept the ads.

If you can't do this - become informed and active - for yourselves, do it for all the little children.  

And, to conclude Rant week we have ......Opioid wars!

My BBF is in a lot of pain because of injuries she's incurred from falling because of her disabilities.   However, she can't get through to her doctors that she actually does need more pain pills to get through 24 hours.  I see her and know her very well, and this woman has never even smoked marijuana, or cigarettes, but they are afraid she'll become addicted to pain pills?  She's not going to get better, anytime soon if ever, and SO WHAT if she gets addicted to something that makes her life bearable?  She needs enough medication to have a little bit of a quality to her life!  Kaiser,  YOU SUCK!   It doesn't shock me that we have an "Epidemic".

And this clip from the article linked below is only tangentially applicable to my BFF's problems with bone headed HMOs but it is somewhat related to it.


From the Washington Post Article HERE:  Italics are mine.

"Policymakers often speak as if the epidemic* will be over as soon as we tackle both legal and illegal opioids. Better control of opioids is essential, but, even without opioid deaths, there would still be as many or more deaths from suicide and liver diseases. Opioids are like guns handed out in a suicide ward; they have certainly made the total epidemic much worse, but they are not the cause of the underlying depression. We suspect that deaths of despair among those without a university degree are primarily the result of a 40-year stagnation of median real wages and a long-term decline in the number of well-paying jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree. Falling labor force participation, sluggish wage growth, and associated dysfunctional marriage and child-rearing patterns have undermined the meaning of working people’s lives as well."

Real wages are stagnated at the level of those in 1972.   I know this to be true because I lived through the whole span of the war on the American Worker, and watched it happening.  Food and shelter became increasingly expensive in the ensuing years.  Except, of course, for fast food.  Clothing, due to the manufacturing job flight to other countries, became less.  But it wasn't enough to make up for the raise in other necessary expenditures.

*the epidemic spoken of here is the so called Opiate epidemic that is all over the Media.

You can fool a lot of people, a lot of the time, but you can't fool Moms....

Rant: be warned.

"Everything happens for a reason"

Really?  Everything?  Hitler happened but what was the reason?  Because "everything happens for a reason?"
I'll tell you what I think.  Hitler happened because a young man got sick and tired of the fact that he saw little children eating out of garbage cans because of war reparations and chose to blame it all on the bankers in England who were, in his view, Heartless to the suffering.  Well, ok, there's a reason.  But all of the Jews must die because, Why? Such an excuse!

Now all of the world must become another conflagration because "it is written"?  Why?  Isn't it about time that a certain mindset should stop forcing Armageddon because of dreams that were dreamed eons ago, involving Angels pouring forth bowls of fire?

We do not, and have never, apparently, truly understood that imagery; this is because "The War to End All Wars" keeps getting fought, over and over again.  Enough already.

We'd really better stop thinking about destroying the only planet with chocolate before it's too late to say, "Oh God, forgive me my sins!"

Listen to your heart.  It's not telling you to hate and kill.  If it is, there is something very wrong with you.

See the tiny, accidental Heart? Ignore the bad Polish, please.
It's been a long, sad week.

A tiny rant....

I told you this one made you think about things.......

The friday5 was about France.  It was kind and upbeat, as always, because the person who creates it is, also.

But, it opened some old wounds that I didn't want bleeding all over such a cheerie and delightful meme.  And it certainly is not the fault of the meme that my mind is the way it is.

Anyway, I have my own thoughts about what's been happening in our world for so long that I can't stand to keep this in.

Sadly, Americans tend to disrespect the French, but that, I feel, is mainly just because the British do.   And I've had to listen to it from the four corners of my life for far too long.

War Stories:  We should, at least by now, think for ourselves.  The French, after all, bankrupted themselves helping us fight the British in our War of Independence.  And, the Brits sunk the entire French Fleet - with sailors aboard, to "keep it from falling into Nazi hands".  They didn't even give the sailors a fighting chance.
In truth: Voir, un couteau á double tranchant.  N'est Pa?  And I'm just too old to keep this stuff inside me anymore because I've heard so many nasty things said over time, and that gets to be an irritant.

Any country, large or small, who had a border as long and flat as the one France shared with the Germany of that time, was in trouble when Hitler took power.  What America did was stay out of the war until the last minute, when é Viola, they had an impeccable reason to enter:  Clue?  Money.  Follow the money.  

Anyway, France and the rest of Europe had born the full brunt of the Nazi machinetta running it's arse all over the flats for quite some time.   They were prone, saving what they could, and then the French fleet was sunk.  The whole thing.  Now, my friends, that is just Nasty, Nasty, Nasty.

I've said what I think.  Now I'll go back to keeping my head down.

Since Blogger has changed...rambling of a deranged blog owner....

Google removed it's own Codes that forced links, of all kinds, into a new page, and they did this for God only knows what reason.  Maybe too many people didn't like getting lost in a maze?  Well, they just created a worse one, in case they never noticed.  Did the devil really make them do it?

"Google, we need to talk"

I've only been able to fix the problem of NOT having a new window pop up, for in-text links - like THIS one for the San Diego Opera's performances of Tosca!

Anywho, that bit of code does seem to work.  I'm still looking for the bits and pieces for the side bar codes.  It will take a few more days, if I have the time.  I'll probably be doing my nails though...  And you all know the kind of time something like that takes.

The side bar buttons would still navigate away from my blog, which I find to be terribly irritating to say the least.  So I killed them- sucked the life right out of them.

Maybe, when I have the strength of mind to do it, I'll put up a link below each of the pictures that will, perhaps, behave like an in-text link (though I really doubt this) and that will solve the problem.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused any reader, though I doubt that anyone besides me really ever used any of those buttons anyway.

And to set the record straight, so you don't think I actually believe in Devils, I don't. Web shots of them just make the most incredible pictorial stand ins for rage!  It's only pixels, after all.  And I DO like the color red.  I didn't link the picture because I'm not sure where it really came from.

Teachers are not robotic test emitting devices and children can't learn this way...

 No Music Monday this week...

Let's discuss American  Kindergarten structures.

It's really not all the School Board's fault....Guess who was pushing the hardest for these changes when I was an Aide?  Yuppie Parents.  Push Push Push...they made me fume.

Washington Post Article about a teacher's choice

Such a mess. This is not,after all, the school system of Japan.  This is ours!
We need not have mothers, with babies in prams, scheming and clawing for placements in pre-kindergarten classes before the baby is even weaned.  
And yet this screwed up system throws away fine minds at an alarming rate when our youth reach the Collegiate level.  This is not right, and never will be!  We need to get this thing fixed!  Can it really be so hard to find a humane way to educate our kids?

Thankful Thursday Rant: reading and writing-ultimate freedoms

Well, Freedom of Speech.  At least that's the way it used to be before the run up to the latest levels of "security".  It's not politics.  It's your children's futures they mess with that gets me,

Nowadays a rancher, let's say,  hardly dares to have a discussion over the back fence with his or her neighbor about "world affairs" without fear of a wired "cow"(or perhaps one with a drone horse fly on her flank) walking up and sending the whole blessed convo back-live- to their ultimate masters in the NSA for "threat" analysis.   After all, there is a lot of manure in those fields and bombs have been built with it.  Ranchers may need to be on the watch list.

Seem silly?  Well it's not that far fetched, and don't think they haven't thought of it, either.  They must really hate Freedom of Speech buffs. I'm thankful to be able to say this without having to worry too much about it.  I'm just an old crank and they've seen worse.

But I am grateful that if a policeman gets vulgar, he will now be on tape in my city.  In L.A. the anti-war protesters had  their ears burned.   Here, we just got watched from rooftops and from patrol cars. I just reminded myself that there are even better places to live for freedom of assembly, and counted them out in my head and prayed for them to stay that way.

I'm glad the librarians stood up to the "request" that they reveal what we were reading.  I'm grateful to them for stiff arming that!  Bambi has no subversive messages that I know of, but then maybe the newer kiddie books do?  And then there are the likes of Howard Zinn or maybe Noam Chomsky? Or perhaps Menachim Begin or Moshe Diane from their terrorist days?  

I'm grateful for all the patriots who stood up on their back legs and said, "No!" to the wild eyed agencies drunk with power and sated on huge meals of public funds.

I feel compelled to say these things before I die.  Librarians are a tough lot.  Don't mess with them.

A Rant about the stupidity of Life in Post 911, as well as it's random acts of Police State Violence.

Maybe this was the problem?  But then, it was 3AM, and maybe all they'd had was Bennys?

Yes, I know, THREE posts in one day but what the hell.

I came home from the gym and have cried the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, the gym has a huge wall of big TVs in front of both usable sets of machines.  They don't have them in the weight lifting area, and I am now going to ask to be taken there ALL the time for any instruction and I will avoid, LIKE POISON, the rest of the gym.

An adorable little baby was horribly burned in a raid that is reminiscent of a shooting of an innocent person in their home here in San County about 15 years ago.  Narcs did that one.

So, I've been playing with the blog and playing solitaire and doing what it takes to not HATE!

About the font:  I had up cursive but it was too hard to read.  I'll be changing things here all the time to preserve my sanity.

"Confusion has it's costs!"  That, according to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  Well that explains the police, they are confused?

The header might change daily....  I have to keep my hands busy so my heart doesn't spiral out of control and start hating people.

Please pray for the baby and his family.  And pray for all the good cops who don't make stupid excuses like they didn't see any toys in the house.  They should have known that the family living there had lost their house and all their belonging in an upper Midwest house fire; they'd gone to Georgia for a fresh start.  This is, after all, the closest to a Police State that America has ever come.  The police didn't know these things?  Well, in San Diego County, they had THE WRONG ADDRESS but we didn't have Homeland Security at that time.  An Agency, that one, that knows how many times a toilet flushes in a house, presumably.  GOD, I AM SO ANGRY!

I can understand why people stop believing, I really, reaaaaally can.  

Tuesday Tails. Canadian Street Gangs and Backstreet infighting between the Air Force and the CIA.

Thank you, Rho!

I've been watching shows with more than a few Hunters from both sides of that border getting Big Howdies from bears, some Black Bears, some Grizzles.  They are people who seemed to be surprised that bears would actually attack if you were out looking for deer and you found one of theirs.  If you go hiking someday in the woods and come across a carcass, please get away from it as quickly as you can manage without really running.

Most of the drama/trauma has been to the humans in the family the last week.  I got a  frantic call from my sister, and it was Jeep to the rescue once again.  Her poor DH has one good eye, and it apparently decided to throw a curveball at him at work.  Mr. Z has been going back and forth between his mother's bedside and taxi service to the clinics and back for DBL.  I've been forced to sit on my arse and do nothing but read or watch Netflix - I know it's a piece of cake- because DH worries that I will do something characteristically stupid - in otherwords, act like the 45 year old I once was and try to lift a recliner up with one hand while vacuuming underneath it.  Yes, I can be as bad as his mother but she's 95!  I'm young!  I want to be FREE!


To make sure my blood pressure medicines are working right, I've decided to read (and emote about) all the skulduggery - and outright lawlessness - of the CIA and the Air Force of the 50's, 60's, and beyond- trying to wrest programs from each other so they can have POWER and MONEY to fulfill their wildest dreams.

And you thought only UFO's were wandering around out there!

 If you want to join the fun, feel free to read the the book above, but take your meds!  Area 51 will tell you where the children's houses and educations have been going! So Droll!  As is said, "the Navy gets the gravy and the Army gets the beans".  Well, in defense dollars, I'm not sure who garners the most "bread", but my money's on the black ops programs run be the two brigands mentioned above.

Cheers!

Belgian physicist François Englert

Professor Englert is not involved.  At least I don't think he is...... ;o)

SteamPunk cosplayers get evicted from the mall. And a Rant about Hunger in America, and what is causing it.

I had to edit some of this.   Honestly, I should not write posts at  2 AM!  I made a dog's dinner of this!

I wanted to do music but just could not.  READ all about it here.  These people were dressed up so well!  Actually, beautifully might be a better word to describe their costumes.  I mean, maybe it was the tiny fake weapons at the wrists?  This was a  heads up from the excellent Elle.

I watched two interesting and disturbing Documentaries today.  I want to encourage anyone who hasn't seen them to take the time to do so.

One is about hungry American children, and some of the reasons this is happening in our country. The political maneuvering by lobbyists on behalf of rich farmers is a sin.  Yes, I would classify it as such.  It's called,  A Place at the Table.  This film is about the 50 million Americans who are going hungry in our land of plenty.  The link goes to NPR.

If you haven't seen this film it will really open your eyes a little wider.  How can this be going on in our country?  Why is it happening?  The documentary tries to tell the why's and wherefores of this tragedy as it was played out over the last half century.  Since I'm so old I do remember most of what was done when our government created the WIC program and the reasons for it.  We almost wiped out hunger in America with this one program.

I was enraged that so many Americans, many of them children, should be going hungry, again, in a country that has an abundance of food, and in which most of the farm subsidies go to those who are growing food for export or bio-fuels.  It made me ashamed.  As Jeff Bridges comments, "Charity is a wonderful thing but we wouldn't count on Charity to run our Defense Department now would we?"

The second documentary is The One Percent.  Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune has made a follow up documentary, now getting a lot more play than it did in 2006, about the wealthiest Americans and the gap between them and the rest of us, but especially the poorest of the rest of us.

In The One Percent, Johnson shows an interview with the Mayor of New Orleans talking about how long it took for a response from Washington, saying in the end of his talk that we needed to make sure that all Americans had a chance to have "a place at the table."  In this same segment, we are treated to then President Bush delighting a group of obviously well off people by saying that he was there to make sure that so and so's beach house got rebuilt bigger and better than it was even before the storm.  I'd never seen this bit of film and thought it a very telling remark from this clueless man.

I'm sick of the sorts of persons who are always trying to label the programs to help our people  "Socialism" .  These are Common Sense programs that help people who fall behind for any number of reasons not related to their Character.  It just makes sense to feed people who are in need, but especially children who are truly helpless to help themselves.

Ok I'm done, and it's nearly 2 AM.  But maybe now that I've gotten this off my chest, I can get to sleep!  The very idea of not feeding the hungry people and especially the Children is repulsive!  Selfish to the core!  What fool thought that up?

Tuesday Tails. Wolfie update;a little stealing of videos; teeny rant.

Roxie's mom over at Cinderellen's Corner put up an amazing frolic of dogs in the snow at Dog Camp.  Be sure to watch the other dog video up farther on her blog, of five Australian Shepherds stalking each other.  Funny!  The link goes to her page where the shepherds "herd" each other.

This is the one I shamelessly stole from her:




Wolfie report:  His eye and nose are slowly getting better.  We won't know for several weeks more whether tear production will come up to grade in his one eye or if he'll have to have medicine for the rest of his life.  I'm hoping not, but then, this is simpler than a lot of things Jazzie went through.

I feel just terrible about it because if I'd been more diligent about checking his eyes everyday, this might not have happened.  His eyes are huge and dark and shiney bright.  Now one looks like a dull little marble.  If you have a Shih tzu or a mix, keep a watch for dry eyes.  They seem to be susceptible to this.

Teeniest of Rants:  I had an interesting convo with DD3 this past weekend.  She told me that I needed to stop obsessing - my word, not hers, about the criminal enterprise that's running the world.  And further more, I should just support the ones who are doing the whistle-blowing and taking all the life threatening chances to reveal the duplicity, and to get the truth out.  And so I will.   I will treat them like the patriots for freedom and democracy that they are, and not let their sacrifice for all of us be forgotten.  I'll hold them in my heart with all the soldiers and policemen who struggle everyday to make sense of what's going on around them.  I'm sure there were plenty of Nazi infantrymen who hated their lives.

Isn't this cute:

Can I have the Dog too?

Music Monday, Boyce Avenue...and Knitting report, maybe a superbowl bit of angst..

 Music Monday:   Boyce Avenue... Train-- Drops of Jupiter



kitting content  with superbowl blah blah..

I sewed the sweater sleeves in as the Superbowl played out.  Frankly, I saw little of the vaunted commercials everyone looks forward to - and which makes it bearable to sit through the time waster of a game that is one hour long but can be dragged out to three.

There were far too many awful promos for every gruesome Fox network upcoming weekly for my taste, all while the relentless stream was rushing by, carrying the Broncos chances with it.   I hate to watch football on Fox.  They cannot do a decent job of airing games properly and should not get another contract.  They reek!

This is my buried lead... I'm glad it's over.  I do wonder though if someone put something in th Bronco's Gatorade?  In these things someone has to lose, and that's competition.  But, it's become such a long season it seems cruel.  I would like this game played to help feed the starving i.e., something more humane.  After all, on this day, over 22,000 people in the world died of starvation.  Hunger Games indeed.


Have a great week.  I'll be catching up during the week to all of your blogs, and your writings on the memes!  Sweet Dreams!

Tuesday tails: Wolfie, 1, knitting, Nil; Some little revelations and opinions re: Just about everything

This is being written earlier in the preceding day, Monday, for publishing on Tuesday.

The little Wolf's Vet visit went well.  His eye is still not putting out enough tears, but what looked like a cataract was the eye protecting itself from the dryness with a cloudy film.  He has a severely dry left eye. 

Wolfie is feeling better because his vet took all the gunk out of his eye, medicated it a bit and tested for tear output.  She found that it's actually gone down, which isn't so good.  Mon Dieu! 

The medicines are so high cost that I've given up, forever, in having another dog because if two of them - and the other dog would be a ShiPoo rescue for certain - were to fall ill we couldn't afford the care.  It's hard enough as it is.  Actually, I am going to go to the web to buy the medications if it is to be a long term thing.

We got back about 45 minutes ago.  The traffic wasn't too bad but there was a retaining wall down along the small, mountainy road we take to get to over the hill to the clinics.  Sadly, it brought down part of someone's house with it.  It's been so dry here lately that it seems odd for a concrete wall to collapse like that.  Usually they will give way when it's been raining for a long time.  Then again, a hillside always has soil creep, and that might be the cause.  Anyway, it  was pretty spectacular.

We stopped off at the park to let the doggie walk a little, and it was freezing.   I just collected a few twigs for paint roller snowman arms and beat a hasty retreat back to the comfort of the Jeep so as to warm up.  Once the sun goes down around here, it starts into frigid ranges-by Californian standards.  65°F.  Ok, now all of you can laugh.  ;o)

Knitting, and my hands: 

IMAGE Source

(Wouldn't we get a lot of knitting done with hands like these?  Think of the tiny crafts we could make!)

I tried to pin in the other sleeve the last couple of days  but the left thumb has decided that it does not want to behave.  It is so sore that I'm trying to retrain the hands to have the right thumb bang down on the space bar of the computer.  After 63 years of using the left thumb for the space bar, the brain doesn't get it.  Maybe a brain transplant?  I got my first typewriter when I was 8 years old or so, for my Birthday.  It's what I wanted.  I meant to be a writer for a newspaper.  Well, that didn't work out now, did it?

To cheer myself up, I remember that Downton Abby, Season 4 is coming tomorrow in the mail.  And, I am going to entertain my brain by  watching  the prequel*  to Morse Mysteries tonight, which I like very much!

ATT and Verizon are trying to squeeze Netflix to get at some of it's profits.  Never mind that they themselves are already charging an arm and a leg to run High Speed Internet to houses, they also want to hack their way into Netflix profits.  It's time to switch to cable.  Why pay for DSL from those two behemoths if they are just going to suck the life out of Netflix,   I ask you?!

Vandals leave big footprints, So... Fie upon thee, Ma Bell - you Restructured Fracture; and fie to thee as well, Verizon, you Venal Witch.

An Internet Vandal's sneaky feet - Stinky, too!

Midst Other NO less Odious Things....

Just doing my bit to help keep the Internet FREE!  Go Cruzio!  You Rock!

* I slept through the prequel.  

Thankful Thursday: And some ranting... well, a LOT of ranting.

First of all, yes,  I am a little pissed off.    I hope that the "brilliant people" in Washington don't go back down that blackened Yellow Brick Road to Perdition that we are still trying to walk away from, in a half assed way, in two countries.  But, I digress....

I'm thankful that there are still people out there in America who are working hard to expose fraudulent use of any government program - our money after all, yours and mine.  Talk about abuse of chemical toxins!  But, I digress...  forgive me, it's hotter than Hades in paradise.

Thank you  Evelyn Pringle .

Thank you Democracy Now for your Piece, HERE

At LawyersandSettlements.com I found THIS.

This is Part One of the article that explains what has been going on in Medicaid Fraud directed at children, some as young as one year.  This article is from 2009.  I'll bet you never heard of it?

Keep your Eyes on The Prize.  The tendency is to bird dog Americans off onto the threat of yet another WAR involving weapons of mass destruction.  A war that may, or may not, be a product of some nefarious third county's annoyingly ever present agency.

What was that saying that Prez. Bush Jr, mangled?  "Fool me once shame of me, fool me twice shame on.. er..."  I think we really need to keep ripping down curtains, and getting looks at the "Wizard" behind them.

And, thank you to all the others who are working hard to expose how government programs are being milked by unscrupulous entities who are laughing all the way to their hedge funds, and other public money milking addresses.   How on Earth can "Karma" handle all of this?  It's insane.

One space or two. Steven Tosh and An Oliver Shanti video

This is the best article I've ever seen about this idiotic, touchy Faux subject.

The reason I'm going off about this is that such laziness is just inexcusable, and saying a person is "acting old", partly because they adhere to a sensible rule, is also inexcusable.  Caroline Hax's manners and style in today's column in the local rag should be called into question. I've never been a fan of Hax anyway as she's generally aggressively snide and abrasive.

DH is going to watch the Super Bowl.  I should go ride my trike to the yarn store...

In truth, I will be rooteling around in various baskets, trying to find the rest of the skeins for Manly/Beastly.  I've misplaced them.  I'll also be keeping an eye out for instant replays of anything interesting enough to watch on screen.  Go 9ers!

Something very beautiful to listen to... Peace and Compassion are wished for all... This is also available on the recording, "99 Essential Chants", but try for a sale at Christmas.  This is the most gorgeous thing I've heard in just ages! Or, you can hear it and buy the cd at Mrs. dechen shak-dagsay's site, through YouTube.

Sunday School and Sunday Matinee

Sunday Matinee this week is the documentary called "Happy".  It chronicles a 30 +  year study of "happiness";  It is about why people are happy instead of depressed even when, by all measures, they shouldn't be happy.

The findings are very informative, especially since Americans are generally an unhappy people, according to most measures of true happiness.  I think it's VERY worth watching. 

 The Linkie  to "Happy".  Watching it made me, well, Happier!

 Sunday School:

On the other side of the coin, we have money grubbing.

Herein lies a little lesson in why we can't make it unless everyone pays their fair share?

LINKIE to Nation of Change article on just how much money the super rich have avoided paying, and why it makes a big freaking difference.

This might be to radical for a some of you but maybe this is right?

Oh, and the Global Banking System just keeps raking it in, too.  We are about to enter a very shady Brave New World.  We can beat them at this game, but it will take local trading of goods.  A village, you know?

Now, to fight back!  We have heated water with solar since 1984, but there is lots more to do.

I grabbed a badge from 350BrighterPlanet.com  after having seen it at Elephant's Eye Blog, which is a fabulous place!  Mosey on over and have a gander at the flowers and stuff of South Africa.

AS the World Burns... Long, get a cuppa...

The Daily Grind: Or, Why I feel like I'm living in the "Pickles" comic strip.

I had a good work out yesterday, and my trainer, whom I swear is a Buddhist Monk, helped me with my inner turmoil as well.  He also applied the foam roll to the darn muscles in my legs that vapor locked this last week. Our understanding is that when I grimace and grit my teeth, he get's to say, "This is all to the good!", and then we both laugh.

So, this isn't a completely beochy post.

Two days ago, Thursday, I took my knitting bag with me when we took my sister to a lab.  I took the knitting, but forgot the patterns were laying on the table under some stupid flyer that had been left on the doorknob.  Joy, Joy JOY!   At least the wait at the lab was not long because we had gotten there at the CRACK of DAWN!

So, when we got home from taking Sis  to get her very sore back ex-rayed, I put the knitting bag with the teddy bear on my shoulder (thanks Suzi!) as we came into the house, and I started looking for the phone that I take out to the area of the comfy chair in order to have it handy while knitting.  Alas, the phone had vanished!  So, after dashing around looking in all the usual places that phone chooses to lurk, I decided to call it, on my cell, to scare it out of hiding.  No luck, I could hear the thing ringing but it seemed to be behind something where it never would have been put; was it maybe inside a drawer?  I pulled out all the drawers.  Nope.

Then DH said, "shut off the machine and call it again."  After arguing for a few minutes over that tactic, I did, with the same result only this time I listened with more care.  The lost phone rang longer, thus proving DH right about it all, and as I turned, the phone kept ringing somewhere behind me.  I walked out to the chair and the sound of the phone followed.  WTFrak?

Yes, dear readers, I had put the stupid phone into the bag on my shoulder but had forgotten having done so.  Phone found, I took what remained of my befuddled brains and sat on them, in the comfy chair.  I did not knit.

Yesterday, Friday, I did almost "Dance in the Kitchen" as I tried to keep from falling on my face after having avoided DH, who came barreling through behind me while taking plates to the dining area table.  After my Robo-dancing cum stumbling around ceased, I was laughing so hard I almost peed my pants.

 Rho, does it count as dancing in the kitchen?   I asked DH, and he stopped laughing long enough to vigorously shake his head, "Yes!".
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Huzzah!  And, "Let the games begin"!

The days have gotten long and hard;  I have a feeling that worry over this caused my own recent "Evac to the Zoooo".

Let Go and Let God.

I want to knit A LOT more ( A LOT MORE), and get those three sweaters finished this year (!!!) !  I want to get my house in order, as in, "tidy" as well as clean.  My favorite Aunt once said to me, "You are just a little untidy but you are clean.  Just work on keeping it all in order."  So I did.  The floor tiles need to be steam cleaned.  I need/want to get/rent a steamer.

Getting rid of business junk has been very hard.  It has to be handled in the proper way.  That takes time and care and so much mental energy looking through/at all the stuff!   Besides, ceramics is heating up again, or was.  We now have a big part of the power grid off line out here on the coast of Cali.  I'll just do the things I can do, and I'll wait 'til after summer to fire all of it if I have to.  The club has it's own kilns which is very handy for hobby stuff.

The San Onofre Nuclear Power Station, and it's possibly improper design, finally caught up with those higher on the food chain than mere shell fish and aquatic plant life.  This last development means that running the kiln will be very expensive.  Life in SoCal will again be like living through those long, dark days of multi million dollar crooks, speaking here of Enron.  This time it will be without, probably-maybe, some tasty little fraud in the mix.

The Truth about farm labor: Updated to set straight a misunderstanding:

Maybe it's because these kids are, as is the modern term labels them, "Hispanic",  but at least 400,000 American children (because either they or their parents were born here) work in the fields*, (see excerpt below) a lot of them working as much as a 30 hour week, and paid very little.  They get behind in school because they constantly have to move with the work, to the point that half of them do not graduate, and those who do so hardly ever do so in spectacular fashion.

Today at the gym, I listened for a few minutes to a couple of over privileged Old Farts yammering on about what Obama had done to grant legal status to immigrant children.   I think it's fantastic he's done this, and this is why:

What this does is start to help heal a cancerous sore that is on the body of workers who pick and put fruits and vegetables on our tables.  The next time you eat a strawberry, or slice up a tomato, I hope you will think about, and care about, all the children working in the field.  It's an American problem, and we need to solve it.

What the POTUS did today was to recognize the problem, put some muscle behind getting it solved, and raising  this iniquity up into the face of the Nation.  It will help the 400,000 American children working in the fields as well.   

Voices from the Fields by S. Beth Atkin

I got my copy from the Goodwill Stores online site.

* "10 years ago the ILO created World Day Against Child Labor, but for the 215 million children who work around the world this day should be their day every day. And this should be the day where we also remember the 250,000 to 400,000 American children who are systematically exploited every year as they harvest the food that we eat.

 They are there right now in our fields, working at far younger ages, for longer hours at exploitative wages and at greater risk to their health than any other children in America because of a loophole in Federal law that permits children as young as 12, and sometimes younger, to work in 100-degree heat in a tomato field for 16 hours, but may not permit that child to work in an air-conditioned office. And this should not be so."

The quote was taken from THIS SITE in a Guest post by Robin Romano, who produced the documentary film, "The Harvest"

If you watch this film, please keep an open heart and mind. The children are bi-lingual, because they are Americans, born here, and have learned English as a dual first language. Trust me on this. They learn it right along with Spanish.

 Also, in the credits are small biographical inserts of Americans who made it all the way to the top with so much against them as children of migrant workers. When some studies that I read in the early 60's were first published, migrant workers were poor white people or black people from the South and Midwest, or seasonal pickers among college age students.

Your treat for reading this far is a Sky Watcher Post.  Make it very BIG.  Love ya!

This is the Marine Layer, breaking up, as we headed home Thursday.
I love that cooling layer of clouds.