RABID JACKELS April 21, 2016

 

There are millions of   Americans–the majority of us–who recognize a great man when they see one. The guy with  pick and shovel,  The cashier behind the counter.

The farmer planting seed.   Young men and women dying in these senseless wars. But when greatness resides in the White House, in the most powerful office in the world, our chests swell.

He’s brilliant. No one needs a dummy.

His words are elegant.  A pleasure to the ears. He has manners  befitting royalty  hosting  guests at a courtly table. If he’s tall and slender and handsome with a family of equal  beauty  we’re even more proud. Please, at this moment, watch a FRONTLINE document: Inside OBAMA’S Presidency.

This young man made one grave mistake: He thought he could reason with his adversaries. He tried his best. He gave it all. But one cannot reason with rabid jackals. The best thing one can do with a rabid jackal is run.  He didn’t run. He held his ground.  He’d the courage  of a madman. Madman?  It goes beyond bravery to confront such a  dangerous animal.

Frothing with greed. For money. For power. Indulging in beliefs so ridiculous they’re an insult to human intelligence.  Rancor, vulgarity, and deceit are its nature. And this den of disease spawned the greatest frother of them all.

I beg you–all of you– don’t descend to his level. May that brilliant maligned woman and that elegant elder join forces. Together they can–we can–heal.

 

 

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Sacred Dog April 20, 2016

American Indians called the horse  ‘sacred dog’ and acquired him  in the mid-1500s when De Soto and Coronado brought it to our shores. The Indians took to the animal like brilliance takes to  rainbows. The horsemen of the plains were considered by many in the American cavalry,”The finest light horse cavalry in the world.” They were never defeated in combat.

The Horse Culture on the plains  lived with their animals, and like the riders in the Spanish School in Vienna today,  came to call them ‘friends’. They lived with their horses. They knew them with their heart.

Lives of the nomadic Plains tribe, especially the Comanches,  were revolutionized by the horse and they became  skilled thieves perfecting the art of  rustling.  They were the best of horsemen and we treated them badly. In 1874 thousands of animals, considered by the southern Commanche to be their best, were senselessly slaughtered.  Ari often reminded me. Horses have a different sense of history and time. All of them recall what earth was like when the world was young and no grunting four-spinning upstarts jammed the roads and fouled the air.

I ‘d tell Ari stories like a silly human–dates and names and stuff like that–and he’d look me in the eye the way a good horse does–and  snort,  reminding me his roots on our home planet went back 40 to 60 million years. His earliest  ancestor, little eohippus, the Dawn Horse showed up a lot earlier in the game than we did. “How long you been around skinny two legs?”

He had me there.

He loved  me to tell him stories.

An incurable romantic,  he loved  fiction best.   Hidalgo, the mustang,  and Frank Hopkins who raced him’cross the Ocean of Fire were his favorites. When Ari was recovering from  surgery,  I constructed a paddock at my end of the barn and rigged  a projector and white sheet sharing the Disney movie with him. He watched it over and over.  For a horse who’d been free as a  feral hen, to be corralled in a 20×20 foot  area for three months–the recovery was long–was an ordeal. I  had to relieve his boredom. Mine, too.

I mean, how many organic carrots can we munch?   He  loved  dearly cornflake butter crunch cookies.

For over forty years I’ve lived with  a horse like the Indian lived with his.  He was a friend.  My best.  He slept in the bedroom next to mine.  I couldn’t ask for a sweeter neighbor. I met him first on Oahu in 1993. We looked each other in the eye and immediately bonded.  Born on Kauai in  1987, he was 29 years old.

The night he died, peacefully in his sleep, he said, “What you skinny two legs need  is another Seabiscuit.” He loved that film best.

His death left a hole in my heart the size of Diamond Head Crater, and a chunk out of my life the magnitude of Mount Kalihi.

But this he gave me: the joy of having known him.

 

 

 

 

 

TRUMP VS GLOBAL WARMING April 11, 2016

Climate change has its sights on its next victim. It’s one of America’s favorite vacation spots.

Hawaii’s known for its near perfect weather, but a  report from the UH Sea Grant program states that islands in the Pacific might be unrecognizable in the coming years as climate change makes them hotter, arid, stormy.  Even disease-ridden.

According to “Climate Change Impact statement the oceans, rainfall, ecosystems and immunity of people who live on islands in the Pacific are all at peril. Tourism-an industry responsible for most of the state’s annual revenue- might vanish.

The study projects:

Higher average temperatures, stressing native animals and plants and causing an uptick in heat-related illnesses in people, as well as a higher concentration of invasive species.
A decrease in trade winds would disrupt  rainfall patterns across  the islands and create periods of drought and heavy rain and flooding;
Warmer oceans and higher ocean acidity,  could trigger massive coral bleaching, marine migration, and affect the ocean’s circulation and the way it distributes nutrients.
Perhaps the most obvious change around the state will be the rise in sea levels, which have risen about 0.5-1.3 inches per decade throughout the last 100 years. The study projects this rate to accelerate, resulting in a 1-foot to 3-foot rise-or possibly more-by 2100.

Most of Waikiki and its famous beach would either be underwater or highly eroded, if sea levels rose 6 feet. The new shoreline would be almost a full mile inland-past the Waikiki hotel strip and into neighborhoods such as Kakaako, downtown Honolulu, even Moiliili. Such a scenario would impact hotel revenues by as much as $661.2 million, with a $2 billion lost overall, each year.

Charles Fletcher, a UH geology professor who contributed to the report, said he imagines that Oahu’s tourist nucleus would have to pack up and move, to a “new Waikiki” on higher ground, “By the end of the century, I’d be surprised if Waikiki Beach is still there.”

Researchers admit nobody knows exactly when or where these changes will take place. Some impacts of climate change have already been observed -such as beach erosion on the north shore of Oahu-while others are “projected to manifest in the coming decades.”  The “warming of the Earth’s climate system is unequivocal,” and climate change is caused by human-influenced greenhouse gases.

Tourism’s still cranking in Hawaii. HTA recently said.  The organization funded the UH study in order to anticipate the challenges Hawaii faces — and try to minimize their effects.

The UH report lists various ways agencies and residents can change habits to  influence change:

Utilize more rain catchment systems. Conserve water.
Preserve and restore coral reefs, beaches, forests, streams, floodplains, and wetlands that have the “ capacity to avoid, minimize, or mitigate the impacts of climate change.”
Go back to the ways of ancient Hawaiian tradition, living along the streams and utilizing  land more efficiently and independently.
“There’s a lot we can do,” Dolan Eversole, an agent with the  program, said. “Like a freight train. We see it coming. Are we going to be ready?”

 

 

GLOBAL WARMING April 6, 2016

The truth is out there…

Climate change can be expected to boost the number of annual premature U.S. deaths from heat waves in coming decades and to increase mental health problems from extreme weather like hurricanes and floods, a U.S. study said on Monday.

“I don’t know that we’ve seen something like this before, where we have a force that has such a multitude of effects,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters at the White House about the study. “There’s not one single source that we can target with climate change, there are multiple paths that we have to address.”

This scientific study claims that global warming will endanger lungs and brains.

Trump on climate change: “I think one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics — in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama’s statement that our No. 1 problem is global warming,” Trump said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

The mogul cited the threat of terror and attacks on the U.S. as more concerning.

“NBC News just called it ‘The Great Freeze’ — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

— via Twitter in 2016

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump’s take on our neighbors in Mexico. .”When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people  that have lots of problems…they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” –Donald Trump

“The wall will go up and Mexico will start behaving.”

Trump’s base? Morons. Well, morons follow their leader. Look at those who followed Dumbya. I think what leaks from their tiny brains is: “Good golly ain’t it  great?  Guys dumb as me can get to be Prisident.”

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.” –Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa as the audience laughed, January 23, 2016

Is it Donald? When one is up against a vulgarian  as psychotic as  you, a padded cell and strait jacket is the best answer. There’s more. I’ll be at this for the rest of the year.

“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

— of John McCain in Ames, Iowa, in July 2015

Like yourself, Donald? Where were you during that  war? You and dumbya? You’re a disgrace to America.

“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America.” –Donald Trump

Megyn Kelly: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’…”

Trump: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

— at the GOP debate in August

By the way, I see nothing humorous  here.  It would be like laughing at a German internment camp.

What kind of mind–I use the term loosely– falls for this vulgar clown?

Minds, maybe, whose brains  burned out  by global warming?

SAY MONEY, HONEY April 1, 2016

Money.

Isn’t that a tidy little word? Pretty, really. It has class. Stands boldly but primly in black ink on a white page. Everybody talks about it. It’s never out of style. Five letters. Two syllables. Anybody can say it and it rhymes with honey as my lede proclaims.

But what is it? It’s a medium of exchange. It comes in different forms.  Different folks in different countries bandy it about in different fashions. In America we have  long green stuff with different faces on it. George Washington’s displayed on the one dollar bills, Benjamin Franklin’s on the hundred. I think Americans like to flash their Benjamins. Today the Washingtons, although hardly anybody  calls them that, are more useful in a bonfire than they are in a department store. Today they’re almost as useless as the penny. (Abraham Lincoln’s mug  is stamped there on some kind of round yellow metal coin that is useful as a weight. It can also be used in  plastic sandwich bags filled with water and clipped to the back of a chair at a picnic. Somehow this odd combo repels flies. Honest. Try it and see.)

I digress.

We also put the green stuff in banks, who jot numbers down on paper and send us monthly accounts as to how much money we loaded off on them so we can write numbers on pieces of paper called checks that we can exchange for whatever if our credit is good. These slips of paper sometimes bounce, which is a factual–but fascinating– feat  for a piece of paper to do and  disagreeably frowned upon by he who accepted the thing in exchange for the hamburger you ate.

A few of us still have a book called a savings account with numbers in it that tell us how much money we’ve stashed. Most of us prefer to see those numbers go up rather than down.  Unfortunately, quite often the banks go belly up and  a cipher, called a zero-as in it’s naught there any more– is rather disturbing. Arabs invented the cipher. They called it ‘sifr’ or ’empty’. Shepherds would send sixteen sheep out to graze and none–zilch, sifr, zero–would return. Maybe that’s what happens to savings accounts?

Confusing. Checks bounce and money saved grows legs and vanishes. Poooof. It’s enough to give you a headache.

I think Americans are addicted to money. We worship it. You get to be a really big time head honcho if you’ve got a bundle of the stuff and I’ve read that 1% of the people in the world–not all Americans– own half of it. Those of us at the bottom, that’s you and me, own 1%.

Weird.

And they, the 1%ers, need more. They always need more. What do they do with it?

How many yachts and Ferrari’s do they need, anyhow?

But, what really fries me, is the awe, the kowtowing, the knuckle undering  that gets plumped on those blokes.

“You mean, like Donald Trump?”

Say money, honey.

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