Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
This is Butternut.
And she made (not in order) Cashew, Pecan, Pistachio, Chestnut, and Macadamia.
Yep, they ARE cute. We don’t beg people to spay and neuter because we don’t love puppies and kittens. We love them to stay alive. These were very, very lucky to make it out of a high kill shelter. I hope they have great lives, and I know they’ll be going to adopters who will make sure they never have litters who aren’t allowed to grow up as part of families.
So the first time I heard this phrase, it wasn’t in a very good context, and I didn’t like it.
Now I hear myself muttering it under my breath frequently, and I’M NOT EVEN IN A CAR.
At approximately 5 pm on September 12, 2018, a man forced his ex-wife, apparently at gunpoint, to go with him to T&T Trucking Inc., in Bakersfield, California, where he shot and killed a male employee with a .50 caliber handgun and then killed his own wife. The perpetrator then targeted another employee who ran away, but he tracked him down and shot him in his car as he was trying to escape.
The perpetrator then traveled to the home of a reported friend and shot both the friend and the friend’s daughter. He then carjacked a vehicle containing a woman and her child, who escaped unharmed. The vehicle was later spotted by a a sheriff’s deputy. When approached by the deputy, the perpetrator fatally shot himself in the stomach.
The victims were:
• Petra Maribel Bolanos de Casarez (45 years old)
• Eliseo Garcia Cazares (57)
• Manuel Contreras (50)
• Laura Garcia (31)
• Antonio Valadez (50)
I constantly find myself thinking of Richard Nixon these days. When looking back, it’s hard to place my memories in a timeframe: from a break-in at the Watergate complex to a growing news story, to televised hearings, Nixon’s resignation before impeachment proceedings could begin, to All the President’s Men giving us a concise and backward look at how the story unfolded over time, to the post-Watergate years when we found out more about how Nixon the man grappled with the downfall of Nixon the president. It’s all woven so deeply together in my thoughts that it seems to have happened all at once. But of course, it took years to get a fleshed-out perspective of the story.
I know that I’m lucky to have had one parent with a keen sense of history and another with a passion for politics. Sometimes I wonder how I remember those hearings, but they took place over the summer when I wasn’t in school. The networks took turns televising them, and my mother was glued to the proceedings. I have vivid memories of watching John Dean testify, with his seemingly serene wife sitting behind him. It was the best daytime drama ever, with my mother playing the Greek chorus to help me process what we were watching. I decided for myself who the heroes and villains were. When several of those villains reappeared in subsequent administrations, their return to the national stage always tainted those administrations for me. I called them The Thugs. Years and a lifetime later, when G. Gordon Liddy came to the bookstore where I was working to sign some stock of whatever book he was promoting, I could understand my manager’s excitement–he was a figure in a riveting part of US history, after all, and again, my father had instilled in me an appreciation of history. But from my viewpoint, what Liddy really wanted to be was a celebrity, and I’m very picky about the celebrities I admire. Simply being famous has never been the only reason a person can appeal to me. Especially when he was one of The Thugs.
But Nixon… However I regard his actions, Nixon stays in my mind as a tragic figure of the kind found in literary classics. Only he was real and part of a larger world than that of a small-town Alabama girl. I loved politics, I loved First Ladies, I loved presidential children. I loved that Nixon’s emergence on the public stage reached back to a general who was part of my own father’s World War 2 history–and Nixon’s daughter married Eisenhower’s grandson while Nixon was in the White House. After the tragic orphaned children of the Kennedy White House, we had sweet Lady Bird and her two daughters who married while Johnson was president, and then came the Nixon daughters’ moments. So the fall of Nixon wasn’t just the tragedy of a man to me. His wife seemed equally tragic, and his daughters’ loyalty to their father was unwavering and reportedly part of the reason it took him so long to resign, right up to the eve of impeachment proceedings.
It was only later that we learned from biographers how tortured Nixon was during his long nights of introspection. It’s one of the key words that always resonates for me about Nixon: introspection. He thought deeply about his soul, his conscience, his actions, his legacy. Unfortunately, maybe the alcohol, whatever medications he was taking, his paranoia–these all acted to prevent the step that is necessary for greatness of words and actions to emerge from introspection. Looking inward and judging ourselves is only part of a process that must end with choosing right action, noble behavior, a sacrifice of one’s baser instincts to the greater good that is IMPERATIVE in a leader. And this is why Nixon was never one of The Thugs in my view. He had the foundation, or the center, to be greater. His course was set early on in his bitterness at the loss to Kennedy…but he NEVER HAD TO DO, OR APPROVE, OR TO COVER UP ANY OF WHAT BROUGHT HIM DOWN. He had a mandate from the American people in 1972 despite massive social upheaval. He had some dramatically successful moments in foreign affairs and with the economy. Had he kept his focus on easing us through our domestic problems and getting us out of an unpopular war, his story could have been so different. But he let The Thugs highjack his presidency, and history was written.
Politics is no longer fun for me. It has become, quite frankly, torture. The feelings our… I can’t say leaders. They aren’t leaders. They are selfish, greedy, small people who betray us daily for reasons we’ll know eventually. The sooner the better. They are worse than The Thugs. They are The Traitors. I see actions every day that can be classified as nothing less than treason, a betrayal of our republic. And no matter what that horror in the White House does, he creates diversions and smokescreens and whoever these people are who believe him and support him are the tragic ones to me. He is a nasty package of autocrat, megalomaniac, narcissist, lazy-minded, dishonest carnival barker without a moral compass. He’s Shakespearean only in the sense that he is “an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
He’s not a patriot. He’s not a Republican. He’s not a conservative. There are an increasing number of those (including John Dean, my TV fixation of the summer of 1973) who denounce him daily. I doubt he has even a moment of introspection any day or night, much less the character to turn any accidental shred of self-awareness into action that benefits anyone but himself and the equally criminal members of his family.
My father once said he wanted to live long enough to cancel out his vote for a president who became a grave disappointment to him (it actually wasn’t Nixon). He did get a second chance to vote for someone else. I often hear myself mentally hoping I can live long enough to look back on all this as the memory of a horrible course the American people corrected.
On June 28, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the offices of The Capital Gazette, an Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper. The gunman killed five employees with a 12-gauge Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun and injured two others as they tried to escape. The gunman had a contentious history with the paper and had previously sued them.
The dead were:
• Gerald Fischman (61 years old)
• Rob Hiaasen (59)
• John McNamara (56)
• Rebecca Smith (34)
• Wendi Winters (65)
I can’t get this quote out of my head:
“This is the second time in eight months that we’ve gone through tragedy,” Rep. Randy Weber, the area’s Republican congressman, said at a news conference, noting Hurricane Harvey’s assault on the area last summer.
I would let my house be flooded 10 more times if it would bring back these ten murdered students and teachers. I know that people lost loved ones in the floods, and my heart aches for them. But a hurricane didn’t “assault” us. It dumped trillions of gallons of water on us.
Not comparable to human slaughter caused by a teenager with guns.
May 18, 2018, school shooting, Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas
Cynthia Tisdale, 63 (teacher)
Glenda Ann Perkins, 64 (teacher)
Jared Conard Black, 17
Shana Fisher, 16
Christian Riley Garcia, 15
Aaron Kyle McLeod, 15
Angelique Ramirez, 15
Sabika Sheikh, 17 (an exchange student from Pakistan)
Christopher Stone, 17
Kimberly Vaughan, 14
When I was in high school, the parking lot was full of pickup trucks driven by students. Many of them had gun racks, and often there were guns in those racks. It was the South. The students were hunters, and depending on the time of year and the athletic event schedule, hunting could happen early mornings or maybe on a Friday night.
Nobody ever took a shotgun or a deer rifle and turned it on their classmates on either of the high school campuses (very open, no security guards, no metal detectors) where I went to school. Such different times. I only ever heard of one student who was caught with a handgun in her bag, and we understood and were probably mostly compassionate about the reason she carried it. It sure wasn’t to use on her fellow students.
I’ve long-understood the perspective of hunters and gun enthusiasts who like to target shoot. I even understand a person’s desire to keep a gun for self-defense (like the girl in my first high school). But from the time I was a sophomore in college and researched and wrote my first paper on gun control (and did this with lots of discussions and consensus with my gun-owning, hunting boyfriend and friends), my belief has not wavered that there is something fundamentally wrong with our need to stockpile weapons that are meant for the sole purpose of killing humans. The second amendment allows: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
We have a well-regulated militia. It’s called the National Guard. Even they make fatal mistakes (Kent State, 1970). Still, as mentioned in the amendment, I don’t call for the “people” to give up their hunting guns, their self-protection, or even their hobby. But there is nothing in that amendment that says there should be no limits to what you own or its deadliness, or its ability to wreak mass carnage in a short amount of time. There is nothing that says you shouldn’t be a certain age, or be expected to be educated in gun safety, or be licensed, or be a registered gun owner. Your vehicle is documented. Your right to drive your vehicle is documented. Your voting right is documented. Your educational achievements are documented. You can’t drive or vote or get certain jobs without that documentation. And there you are, driving, voting, and working.
Stop crying like little babies when you’re expected to follow some regulations to possess guns. Babies shouldn’t have guns. Act like an adult.
And “leaders,” stop being held hostage by a group that has lots of money but not nearly the power you ascribe to it. You work FOR US. Year after year, in poll after poll, a significant number of your constituents have expressed their belief that we need to do something about the gun problem in our nation.
I never thought I’d live in a country that other countries have on their travel advisory because of our gun violence. That I’d read how people all over the world feel sorry for Americans because of the society we live in. We are SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. Our children and students and fellow citizens deserve that we adults behave as our best selves.
I have been waiting since my Button Sunday post on November 5 for this. It has left me shaken and so furious on Uma Thurman’s behalf that I haven’t been able to think of anything else this afternoon. I think of my friends who are huge Tarantino fans, particularly of his work with her. I’ve seen very little of this, because in general I don’t watch violent movies. But at least there’s always the thought, “It’s not real violence. It’s just a movie.” Over the past few months, I’ve had to acknowledge that many of the romantic comedies and favorite movies in which I’ve lost myself had a real-life violence behind them that has stolen the pleasure they once gave me.
This is the NYT feature on Uma Thurman. Try to find the full article, including a piece of film from one of Thurman’s films. I know sometimes NYT articles are blocked if you’ve read too many on the site, because they want subscribers. But I’m sure it’ll be posted elsewhere. I’m never going to be able to unsee that film clip. There are many actors who like to do their own stunts and often have to be discouraged for their own safety. But to force someone to do something after she’s clearly stated her fears and reluctance to do it–it’s easy to believe this was a warning or a punishment to a woman who was not playing by rules devised by a truly despicable group of powerful men.
On November 5, 2017, 26 were killed (including a pregnant woman, and not including the perpetrator, who took his own life) and 22 were injured when a gunman opened fire at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
The dead were:
Keith Allen Braden, 62
Robert Michael Corrigan, 51
Shani Louise Corrigan, 51
Emily Garcia, 7
Emily Rose Hill, 11
Gregory Lynn Hill, 13
Megan Gail Hill, 9
Carlin Brite Holcombe (unborn child)
Crystal Marie Holcombe, 36
John Bryan Holcombe, 60
Karla Plain Holcombe, 58
Marc Daniel Holcombe, 36
Noah Holcombe, 1
Dennis Neil Johnson Sr., 77
Sara Johns Johnson, 68
Haley Krueger, 16
Karen Sue Marshall, 56
Robert Scott Marshall, 56
Tara E. McNulty, 33
Annabelle Renae Pomeroy, 14
Ricardo Cardona Rodriguez, 64
Therese Sagan Rodriguez, 66
Brooke Bryanne Ward, 5
Joann Lookingbill Ward, 30
Peggy Lynn Warde, 56
Lula Woicinski White, 71