Flowers and a bit more
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Posted:Jul 13, 2020 5:56 am
Last Updated:Jul 14, 2020 3:33 pm 15120 Views
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Almost into the peak summer flowering season with the early starters reaching the end of their main season and the late season plants starting to come into their own.
Not forgetting the humble vegetables because it is not all about flowers.
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FOX ADMITS 'TUCKER CARLSON LIES AND HIS AUDIENCE SHOULD KNOW THAT'
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Posted:Jul 8, 2020 1:16 am
Last Updated:Jul 10, 2020 3:08 pm 14956 Views
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FOX ADMITS
'TUCKER CARLSON LIES AND HIS AUDIENCE SHOULD KNOW THAT'
How can so many sheep watch a propaganda channel which can actually argue IN COURT that their star presenter lies and they expect people to KNOW that he lies?
"Tucker Carlson doesn't have an obligation to investigate the truth of statements before making them on his show, and his audience doesn't expect him to report facts", a lawyer for Fox News told a New York federal judge on Wednesday.
The network is facing a slander lawsuit from Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who made headlines over a $150,000 payment she received from the National Enquirer in connection with her alleged affair with Donald Trump.
"What we're talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times. It’s 'Tucker Carlson Tonight,' which is a commentary show,” a lawyer for Fox News argued while defending a lawsuit from Karen McDougal.
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If these pics do not cheer you up nothing will
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Posted:Jul 4, 2020 4:45 am
Last Updated:Jul 17, 2020 6:54 pm 15084 Views
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The Quokka of Rottnest Island,Western Australia is a small wallaby and must have the happiest smiley face of any animal the planet.
I did not take these pictures but they really are the most cheery things the internet.
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Flaming June -- for real- in the garden
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Posted:Jun 25, 2020 6:29 am
Last Updated:Jul 4, 2020 2:17 am 15035 Views
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Just a few pics of the early summer flowers .
1. Blue and white Canterbury bells plants seem want grow into each other.
2. Blue scabious - Jasone Laevis Blaulicht
3. Rose and Nasturtiums climbing the trellis under the dec The Nasturtiums self seeded so profusely I had pull out most of them.
4. Penstemon fanfare which was a seedling only 2 ago and now is making a takeover bid for one corner of the garden.
5. Our own 'Kaffe und Kuchen Ecke' which is just nicely shaded by 4 pm in the afternoon.
6. One of 2 (so far) Kaka beak plants grown from seeds imported from New Zealand. This should climb up 3 metres ( ft) over the arch.
7. Hanging baskets hung below troughs; a recurring theme .
8. Another trough with hanging basket on the wall by the deck
9. Flower pot corner. The pots are arranged in sets of 3 on 2 levels in a triangle with the next offset by 60 degrees balanced above.
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Is the problem a few bad cops?
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Posted:Jun 11, 2020 2:27 am
Last Updated:Jun 15, 2020 2:05 pm 15106 Views
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Much has been made about the 'few bad apples' argument on both sides of the debate but the problem would appear to be much more to do with the functionality of law enforcement in the USA.
There exists nationally a plethora of under trained police forces which are regarded by a large section of society as being unfit for purpose. The mentality that buying in ever more costly military hardware will somehow 'fix' things only exacerbates this divide.
When the rhetoric coming from the top is 'dominate', 'confrontation', 'shoot' if they do not 'obey' then the whole tenor of policing is no longer to 'serve and protect' but policing OF the people rather than BY the people. Police and citizens (why do US Police refer to them as civilians so often?) should never be them and us; police are members of the same communities which they are supposed to serve; THEY ARE US.
I specifically highlighted under trained because I believe that it is the root of the problem.
If we compare training -
Japanese police train for 4 years to become police officers then have to undergo a compulsory 2 years of specialist training on the job.
UK Police have to have a degree and train for 2 years afterwards, take a degree over three years whilst training to be a policeman or do a three year 'degree apprenticeship.' All Scandinavian police forces have a similar training set up.
German police train for a minimum of 2 years at the academy; French police for one year at the academy then at least one year on the job training which can be extended for three monthly periods if they are not deemed well enough qualified.
Despite this all of these forces have ongoing monitoring of racial bias and take remedial action when it is detected, in the case of the London Met quite drastic action with reform from top to bottom. They are all police forces subject to national standards even though organised on a regional basis which may also have a lot to do with it.
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, police training in the many and various US police academies can range from four weeks to 6 months. However, this range excludes any field training that the recruit may need to take.
In the light of these facts it would appear to be a good idea to look into:-
1. Developing a national standard for police training. Training in deescalation techniques takes much more time than training in riot techniques or the use of force.
2. Reducing spending on hardware and using the savings to improve the education and training offered. The (other) armed forces have national training requirements.
3. Developing a national register of LEOs so that an officer sacked for misconduct in one force cannot move to a separate jurisdiction and join another force. Once again the armed forces have centralised records of every member's service record.
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George Will calls for the complete obliteration of the GOP.
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Posted:Jun 3, 2020 4:14 pm
Last Updated:Jun 5, 2020 1:30 am 14940 Views
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"In life's unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation's domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for ... what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world's most risible deliberative body."
That is an absolutely stunning paragraph from anyone. That it is from one of the longtime leading minds of the conservative movement is all the more devastating.
To call for not just Trump's defeat but also the loss of Republicans' Senate majority is a striking move on Will's part. As a longtime advocate for the conservative overhaul of the judiciary, Will knows better than most what a Democratic president and Democrat-controlled Senate would mean.
It would mean, in short, federal court vacancies being filled by judges far more liberal than Will -- and with far more expansive definitions of how the Constitution should be interpreted. And with lifetime appointments to their jobs.
Will's view is, effectively, that the Trump version of the GOP is so corrupted, so broken, so beyond repair that the only solution is to raze it -- and start from the ground up again.
As he writes:
"The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear "magically," as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting."
Dismiss Will as a disaffected old-timer if you will, but remember too that he is someone who was a conservative long before the age of Donald Trump.
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Say it with flowers
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Posted:May 29, 2020 6:42 am
Last Updated:Jun 5, 2020 7:39 am 15088 Views
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Flowers always cheer up anyway.
A few pics from this morning in the early sun.
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AND THEY TRY TO SAY BIDEN HAS DEMENTIA?
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Posted:Apr 28, 2020 12:31 am
Last Updated:Jul 15, 2020 5:10 pm 19812 Views
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OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPT — UNEDITED.
REPORTER: I wanted to ask you specifically about one industry in particular, and that’s food-processing plants. Is there a priority to get testing at food-processing plants all across the country?
TRUMP: "Well, you’re asking that because of what happened — it’s a fair question, too — what happened in Denver. Because in Denver, I’ve never seen — I said, “What’s going on?” We’re looking at this graph where everything’s looking beautiful and it’s coming down and then you got this one spike. It’s — I said, “What happened to Denver?”
And many people, very quickly, and they — by the way, they were on it like, so fast, you wouldn’t believe it. They knew every aspect. They had people go and — not only testing, “Who did you see? Where were you? How many people did you meet? Were you out to dinner in somebody else’s home? Where were you?” Where did — where did this number of people come from? How did — they are totally on it.
Now, this just happened. I just saw it this morning. I’m looking at everything smooth, going down, topping out. And then you have this one spike in Denver. It’s like, where did this come from?
So we’ll be looking at that. And we don’t want cases like that happening. This was — but this — this is the kind of thing can happen. This is very complex.
This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it. And they’re constantly trying to come up with a new — people go to a hospital and they catch — they go for a heart operation — that’s no problem, but they end up dying from — from problems. You know the problems I’m talking about. There’s a whole genius to it.
We’re fighting — not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart. Okay? It’s invisible and it’s hidden, but it’s — it’s very smart. And you see that in a case like a Denver.
But, you know, I think we’re doing well, and they’re on Denver like you wouldn’t believe. I came in this morning; it was a flurry. I said what’s going on? They said, “Denver.” I said, “What happened to Denver?” Because Denver was doing pretty well. And they’ve got that under control. But, yeah, that would be a case where you do some very big testing."
If you've made it this far, please keep in mind that the Smithfield meat processing plant that has become a COVID-19 hotspot, and precipitated the reporter's question, is in South Dakota, not Denver. And antibiotics have never solved viruses.
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Ireland's summing up of the situation.
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Posted:Apr 27, 2020 1:05 am
Last Updated:Jul 5, 2020 3:43 am 23822 Views
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From the Irish Times:
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S.
NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
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Just pretty flowers to brighten up the doom and gloom
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Posted:Apr 19, 2020 7:19 pm
Last Updated:Apr 20, 2020 4:33 pm 19738 Views
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As I have been chatting with a lot of people about getting out in the garden during lockdown I thought it might be worth sharing a few pictures of the ongoing project.
As anyone who has a garden knows the job is never finished but I hope these pics from last summer and this spring give a flavour of where it is headed.
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