Bald Eagle Watching Over the Nest

An Unlikely Pairing That Works

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with Tom Jones on lead vocals and Dallas Taylor on drums and Greg Reeves on bass! This was the Déjà Vu line up. Never better. And Tom Jones was a *powerful* singer. Amazing he was given the slot and took it, but he doesn’t blow it.

Another unlikely (and wonderful) pairing is below.

Another Load to Move Around the Yard

Fifteen cubic yards of wood chips is getting soaked by rain at the moment, but no complaints here, as we need the rain. I will move this around over the course of the next week to 10 days.

I am happy to report that all 18 of the new fruit trees are in bloom or are starting to leaf out.

I think all of the bushes I bought sight unseen (and leaf-bare) at auction from a lanscaping place that was going out of business appear to now be leafing out. 

The 550 daffodils I planted in the Fall are now all in full bloom.

The 23 berry plants put a few weeks ago in their deer-proof  enclosure look a little forlorn, but hopefully the raspberries, blackberries, Nanking cherries, grapes, and gooseberries will spring to life in the next few weeks. 

The Model for Cruella DaVille?

This contestant and her three Dalmatians won first prize at the London Dog Show in 1929 with an outfit that looks suspiciously like it was made of skinned Dalmatians.

Dodie Smith's 1956 novel “The Hundred and One Dalmatians,” was made into a movie by Walt Disney in 1961.

Birds In the Yard This Morning

 

This Public Service Ad is From 2002

We are already here.

Y’all Going Back to This?

No?  Then RESIST!

Another Generation of Bald Eagles

Bald Eagles generally hatch one egg a year, though I have known three to hatch, and two to survive to fledge and fly off.

The Ideal Puppet

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” ― Hannahc Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Police Work for the Rich

The police work for the rich. They will not protect your Social Security or pension, your Medicare or Medicaid. 

If your landlord does not fix the roof or the broken furnace, they will not help you, but if you miss rent, they will be the folks who show up to evict you.

Living in the Ever-present Now

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.” -— Milan Kundera

Bang Bang

Some folks can do it LIVE in front of the world!

And for you kids in the back, there was another great song, with the same title, by Nancy Sinatra.

Into the Woods Alone

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. 

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. 

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. 

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” 

— Mary Oliver ~ Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

Greenland :: A Movie Plot

The philandering Vice President of the United States sends his ethnic wife to visit Greenland, uninvited, after the senile and overtly racist President of the US says the US would soon take Greenland “one way or another”.  

A Russian sniper, sent to Greenland two weeks earlier, fires a shot that shatters the spine of the VP’s wife, and the sniper then disappears, unidentified.  

The President of the United Staes uses the sniper attack as an excuse to invade Greenland, an independent territory of Denmark. 

The US invasion of the territory of Denmark triggers Article 4 of NATO, leading to the immediate expusion of all US bases out of Europe. 

Within a week, Putin is making parallels between the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the US invasion of Greenland, saying all countries have a right to “secure their borders and their people” against “violence and provocation”.

Later, it turns out that the Russians have been listening to supposedly “secret and discrete” chats on Signal, whereby the President and his Vice President have arranged for massive kickbacks and bribes from both companies and foreign nations using crypto-currency, the sale of worthless trinkets, and stock-manipulation schemes.

The Signal traffic also reveals that the Vice President has been involved in two extra-marital affairs, and has voiced considerable dissatisfaction with his marriage, which now clashes with his political ambitions.

In a surprise move, following the US invasion of Greenland, Canada announces that Pornhub and two related sites headquartered in Canada are, in fact, owned by a Cayman Island-owned holding companies owned by Russian organized crime and believed to be operating as GRU cut-outs.  

Rumors in Washington swirl as lists of the porn-watching habbits of fascist-apolgist politicians and business leaders are posted to the Internet. The elderly Senator from Louisiana issues a press release denying he has ever watched dwarf porn, while the Senator from South Carolina says he will not “dignify” his reported viewing habits with a response. 

In the ensuing chaos, seven northern border states secede from the US and join Canada as “provisional provinces of Canada,” while Texas declares itself to be a newly independent nation.

The movie ends with a team of Navy Seals, organizing in secret, and headed by a cool, clear-eyed, and capable six-foot-two inch lesbian, down-roping onto the roof of a Florida country club owned by the President. In the resulting fire-fight, two dozen bad people get two to the chest and one to the head as face-lifted, silicone inflated, wig-wearing hanger-ons scream and run, falling into the pool, sprawling over a gold-plated omelet station, and disappearing into a dark night puncuated by golf carts and the fluttering flags of putting greens.

As the sun comes up the next morning, the camera pulls back revealing that it’s many months later as a new President is sworn into office. 

Inauguration Day news commentators fill in the denouement of the last Administration, and the rise of a new administration, which has promised to tax billionares, stop subsidizing large businesses, and require four years of high school civics courses.

As the last minute of news comentator explanation and commentary trails off, we see the billionaire South African financier of the last Administration standing in a passport line to exit the country for parts unknown. 

Credits roll.

Peregrine Love Is In the Air

Peregrine Falcons this morning near Point of Rocks, both male and female. They are paired and mating. but not yet broody or spending time at the nest.  I figure that’s two weeks away or so.  

They have set up in an old Raven nest. One-hundred car trains pass just below their cliff nest, but they seem to have assimilated that commotion.  

Last picture is of the female plucking a small bird I saw her catch on the mid-river island forest where I spotted them calling to each other.  These pictures were shot from some distance with a P90 Nikon point and shoot (hand-held).

Saluting a Local Hook

At my local for a cup of darkness and a bagel, I see a promo for a documentary on local Frederick, Maryland native and fly fisherman extraordinaire Bernard “Lefty” Kreh.

Two years ago, Lefy was monumentalized with a statue in the city’s Culler Lake. The statue is about twice lifesize, and is perfectly sited in the water, with waders on and fly line gathered in a fetch at his side.

Lefty Kreh is famous for his books and for his “Lefty’s Deceiver” streamer fly first tied by Kreh for fly fishing for Striped Bass in the Chesapeak Bay. The Deceiver is the best known saltwater fly pattern in the world, and in 1991 the US Postal Service honored it with a postage stamp.

Lefty Kreh was inducted into both the Freshwater Fishing and International Game Fish Association halls of fame, and Fly Fisherman magazine has hailed him as “fly fishing’s greatest ambassador. into both the Freshwater Fishing and International Game Fish Association halls of fame, and Fly Fisherman magazine has hailed him as “fly fishing’s greatest ambassador.

99 Problems

Bald Eagles Sitting on the Next Generation

Bald Eagle sitting higher in the nest today, as it’s warmer.  

The wind was fierce yesterday, with all the small birds bunkering in the deep cuts of stream beds.  Actually saw two fly out of groundhog den holes.

Willow and Darwin

 

Earthworms, Groundhogs, and Glaciars

Believe it or not, a great deal of the United States was earth-worm free prior to the arrival of Europeans. No native earthworms occured in the northern portion of the continental United States or anywhere in Canada except for a small section along the coast near the U.S. border. This absence of earthworms is believed to be due to Pleistocene glaciations -- probably the same force that limited the range of the American groundhog to the same eastern region earthworms were once limited to.

Approximately 70 species of native earthworms have been described from the eastern United States and another 28 species from the Pacific region. Another 45 imported species of earthworms are now commonly found in various parts of the U.S.-- mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest and concentrated in areas with disturbed soils (i.e. regularly plowed fields).

Pictured is the native range of American earthworms.

Chemo For Cancer

.

IT’S AMAZING TO SEE SUCH TERRIFIC LEADERSHIP in Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and all the rest.

This American salutes you!

Please continue to freeze out the United States under Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and the cowering cowards in the Republican and Democratic parties.

Trade among yourselves, do not buy US-made weapons, farm equipment, or farm products.  

Do not vacation to the United States, and refuse to load or unload ships going to, or coming from, the United States.

We are not confused, and we know what this is about.  

Trump and the MAGA morons are a cancer on America, and we need all the chemo and radiation you can send our way.  

Will it hurt? Sure. 

Will it make us sick?  Absolutely.  

But if we are to rid ourselves of these Nazi-saluting Putin-apologists, then we will need strong medicine capable of killing us.  

We know the chemo and radiation will stop when the MAGA cancer is gone.  And though we may end up hairless, atrophied, and weak, the alternative to the chemo and radiation is the death of America as we know her and love her.

So please, fire up the radiation machines and chemo dose the shit out of us until this cancer is gone.

America is tough.  We can beat this cancer, but YES, we need the chemo and radiation.  And if you want to send a surgical strike team, we’re more than OK with that too.

Cash Always Accepted

A Crazy Price

That’s His Story, And He’s Sticking To It

The Last Fruit Tree Acquired

An Asian pear!

This tree joins three kinds of apple trees (8 total), 3 peach trees, 2 cherry trees, 3 plum trees, and 2 crab apple trees.

The deer-fenced berry patch includes 2 Brandywine Raspberries  4 Latham Raspberries, 2 Heritage Raspberries, 6 Chester Blackberries, 3 Nanking Cherries, 3 Gooseberries, and 3 Red Seedless grape vines.

The 550 daffofil bulbs I planted last year are coming up and just starting to bloom.

The 12 Shasta Viburnum, 6 Redwing American Cranberry Viburnum, and 8 female Red Winterberry that I planted in November are (hopefully) waiting to leaf out, as are 22 Gold Mound Spirea..

Blondi Nazi Memorabilia

I came across the piece in an antique store in New Oxford, Pennsylvania. No, I did not buy it; no Nazi stuff for me.

For more on the German Shepherd Dog as a living token of anti-semitism and Nazi myth, see here. 

Dispose Your Dog’s Musk In the Bin

The Fascist Technocracy inc. Movement

Elon Musk's grandfather was a member of the "Technocracy Inc." movement until 1941, when it was outlawed as a fascist group. 

Their plan was to end democracy and unify the American continent to control Greenland, Canada, and Panama. 

A Ruby in the Hedge

Another Generation of Frogs Begins

Biking With the Wee Wolves Today

Wee Man Living the Life

The Department of “Government Efficiency”

Free Borsht Upon Putin’s Death

Today is the 72nd anniversary of Stalin’s death. Here is how an Ukrainian immigrant celebrated the occasion in 1953.

Presenting Crufts Without Thinking or Asking

Did anyone ask the Crufts presenter with dwarfism (achondroplasia) about her opinion on intentionally breeding dwarf dogs with the rather predictable health problems that follow?

Did anyone ask the Crufts presenter with spinal cord injuries about his opinion on intentionally breeding dogs that have predictably high spinal and neuro-muscular problems? Did anyone ask the mixed-race presenter about his opinion on Cruft’s focus on “pure breeds,” and whether he thought so much attention on coat color might be a tad problematic?

Did anyone ask the gay presenter why she was there at all? Is it a requirement that every dog show have a gay commentator, and that none of them know a single thing about dogs?

Oh yes, I am a HORRIBLE PERSON for asking.

But don’t you think asking those questions might have been just what the dogs would want asked?

Phil Drabble on Bert Gripton

French Embassy, Washington, DC

Beware When Fascists Throw You a Bone

In correspondence this morning, a friend suggested Social Security was some sort of Ponzi schemes.

No, that’s wrong.  

It’s talking points propaganda circulated by the Cato Institute whose Wall Street funders *really* want to privatize Social Security.

Social Security is actually one of the best funded pension systems in the world, a point I used to make regularly when I was Director of Communications for what is now called the Alliance for Retired Americans — the AARP of unions.

It is not remotely like a Ponzi scheme.

For starters it has a large team of actuaries attached to it, actuaries I have wrestled with on two important points.

The wrestle I *lost* is an important one.  

Social Security actuaries, “out of an abundance of caution,” project future income and outgo assuming the US goes into a decade-long depression equal to the worst 3 years of the Great Depression.  

Is that reasonable?

They argue, of course, that they have to be *extremely* cautious.  

Which is fine, but it results in some amusing predictions.  

For the last 50 years, Social Security actuaries have been predicting future Social Security insolvency using Great Depression projection data.  So when Social Security actuaries say, in 1990, that Social Security will “go broke” in 12 years, we find that 12 years later they say it will “go broke” in another 13 years, while 13 years later, they say it will “go broke” in 14 years.

And of course it doesn’t go broke — it can still pay out 95 percent of what was promised (complete with annual COLA).

So what argument with SSA did I win (of sorts)?

Well I got a wee bit over-caffeinated one day and started doing math on three or four Starbucks napkins.  

Long story short, I figured out that if the Social Security tax cap was removed (as it was for Medicare), then Social Security would *never* go broke even using the Depression-era data. 

I called up the #2 actuary at the Social Security Administration and asked her the question and faxed over my math.  

Her reply was pregnantly evasive; I had to get a Member of Congress to ask her or the chief actuary that question.  

So I did — I made a few phone calls and went down to Bernie Sanders’ office, and HE asked the Social Security Administration that question.

And YES, the Social Security Administration replied that it was indeed a simple and complete fix!

I promptly ordered 10,000 painters caps that said “remove the cap,” and held senior citizen rallies and teach-ins around the country.

I also ran a quiet internal check.  You see, I worked for Unions, and most of the national Union presidents (never call them a “Union Boss”) were paid enough to be Social Security tax exempt sometime in the year.  

I ran the numbers for two dozen big union presidents and winced at the results.  My proposal was going to cost all of them thousands of dollars.

What to do?

I bit the bullet and wrote a lead article for our in-house 400,000 circulation magazine about the “secret” of the gilded class.

The secret of course, was that the rich were getting a big pay raise no one else knew about. 

No other tax STOPS when you make more money!

To illustrate the piece, I had Bill Gates stopping Social Security taxes 5 minutes after midnight.  I had other big names in there too — I remember Diane Sawyer made $7 million a year at the time.  

Members of Congress stopped paying Social Security taxes on July 1st back then.  

But the folks that scrubbed the floors in Congress?  

They paid Social Security taxes all year long.

So did most workers, including most union members. 

Whenever Union presidents would meet with retirees to talk about the “Clinton Care” health insurance package (I wrote the AFL-CIO training package on that), they also got hit with questions about the Social Security tax cap.

Long story short, the issue was pushed up to the top of the AFL-CIO decision tree from the union floor. 

At an AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting on the subject in Chicago, it got a bit testy and the proposal remained unresolved.  I feared someone else was doing the math of what this proposal would cost individual union presidents. 

At the next meeting in Bal Harbor, Florida, however (and with a thousand seniors wearing “remove the Social Security tax cap” hats), the official position of the AFL-CIO on Social Security was amended to endorse removing the taxable earnings cap.

Victory!

A final bit to this story.  

I was in Los Angeles at the Biltmore Hotel doing a big union retiree convention with all kinds of political and union wheels, when Steel Workers president George Becker came up to me.  He appeared very serious.

I had never formally met Becker before, but he rather aggressively tapped me in the chest. 

“You the guy who was pushing to raise the Social Security tax cap?” he asked. 

I flashed back to what I remembered each Union president making.  My proposal was going to cost Becker north of $6,000 — maybe more.

I braced myself, and said I was.

He punched me in the chest again with his finger and smiled.  “Good job!”

I let out a huge sigh of relief.  

Today, eliminating the Social Security tax cap is now the official position of the Democratic Party.

As for what Social Security really is, that’s simple:  the most popular and successful government program in the US, and arguably the world.

It has never missed a payment and, unlike most defined benefit pensions, it has a cost of living adjustment.  

Unlike most 401-ks, it cannot be robbed by folks who want a bigger bass boat or a bigger house.

Even today, most Americans retire with *nothing* other than Social Security.

You think you’re a stock-picking genius?  Cool.  What’s a no-load fund?  What’s a zero coupon bond?  Who is Robert Citron?

If you want to play with money, you’re still free to do so, but I’m always amazed that so many of the folks who want to play poker against card sharps don’t even know the basics of the game.

So what else about Social Security?

Social Security is progressive in that if you make more than $60,000 a year or so, you *may* pay more in than you pull out, and if you make less, you *may* collect more than you pay in.  

The bend points here depend to some extent on sex (women earn less and live longer), race, etc.  

Insurance programs are, by definition, risk pools, but Social Security has public service actuaries attached to it in order to maximize security, rather than hedge fund managers looking to maximize profit, or corporate paymasters looking to underfund the company pension program.

As with all insurance, current enrollees are paying a portion of what is going to current retirees.

As with every bank, the money collected in the past is not sitting in Scrooge McDuck’s vaults, but is being put to work in the community funding housing, education, roads, health care, defense, etc.

Bottom line:  Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme in any way, shape, or form.

You want a Ponzi scheme?  

Look at Tesla.  

My notes about *that* can be read >> here

Let’s just say:   Caveat emptor!