Ciudad Juarez. 1.3 million souls across the Rio Grande from El Paso. The murder rate is supposedly down from a record of 30,000 in 2010.
I am waiting for the bus at a bus stop. I don't have cash for a taxi. It is too far to walk. There are about 24 other resigned people here waiting. It's after 6 pm, we're tired, we all want to go home. This is routine here. When the bus comes, there may not be room for all of us. So we will push and shove and some of us will still be here waiting for the next bus. Eventually, we'll all get home.
Since the narco wars started, going home has become more important. It's the only real chance of being safe. Nobody goes out here in the evening. Ever. And nobody goes out for a walk. Going out is like asking to be shot or kidnapped. Going out to a bar for a drink and to watch the futbol game is like declaring that you're a combatant on one of the four or fives sides of the War in Juarez. So getting home has some urgency. 60,000 people have already died in Mexico since the War on Drugs started. Nobody here wants to be in that statistic.
Years ago at this stop, the bus pulled in and there was a shooting. That was just at the start of the much greater wave of killings brought by the maquiladoras and the War on Drugs. When the door opened, a young man climbed up the steps to the driver to pay his fare, took out a small automatic machine gun, and shot the driver 16 times. I don't know why. I can't imagine why. Then as if the bullets had turned everyone to cement, the young man quickly made his getaway on foot. Later, nobody could provide any details at all about the shooter. Those shots were for me the opening fusillade in the War in Juarez.
I am waiting for the bus. I hope it comes soon. There is a small Toyota pickup parked across the street from the stop in the dark shade. There is something about it I don't like. The driver has mirrored sunglasses. I can see that. And there is a big man, also with sunglasses, standing in the bed. I thought he might have a big gun, a machine gun of some kind, but I can't see clearly from here what that is. What is he doing with a machine gun in daylight in Juarez? All I can see is that he's got something big and heavy.
The bus comes. It is entirely too full of other passengers to take all of us. Those who are at the front of our disorderly, disorganized line struggle and get on, then there is no room for anyone else. There's pushing and shoving, some cursing. The driver closes the door, and he leaves behind a cloud of dust and diesel exhaust and sweaty people, who will continue to wait for the bus.
At this, I look across the street. At the Toyota. The guy in the back clearly has a big machine gun. It is mounted on top of some kind of stand. It has long lines of bullets hanging from it. The truck pulls quickly out from the curb, makes a wide left turn so that it is now coming quickly toward the bus stop. At that, the man begins to shoot. I feel a bullet crush my right arm at the elbow. And in slow motion, I see the line of people to the right of me fall down one after the other. Blood is spattered everywhere, and there are pools of blood on the ground. And people are screaming and crying and dying.
There is nothing I can do. I have no idea why I have been shot. I sit on the corner of the bench, and I wait for an ambulance. Hopefully, it will come soon.
Only about 4 miles of it, in the hassocks. The surface of the moon with two centimeters of topsoil. And beavers! Spent the day with a researcher who started working on it at 22, two weeks after all that middle part at the top in back became foreground, and has been there all 32 years since. I think he may be the luckiest person I have ever met, no joke.
Where the fuck is it, you ask? For the non-Washingtonian, that's St. Helens. Today. Quite definitely today.
Kirsten Breitweisser who truly suffered with the loss of her husband on 9/11/01 continues to be honest, caring and passionate about being better than those who perpetrate violence on others and/or exalt in such violence.
...
Now one year later, I am once again driven to write due to witnessing President Obama resort to the same campaign tactics as George W. Bush.
Frankly, for what it's worth, it sickens me; and it saddens me.
President Obama, have you lost your way so much that you now believe that the murder of anyone should be your most defining moment? A moment for which you want to earn votes?
Respectfully, Mr. President, perhaps you should relinquish your Nobel Peace Prize.
In the end, I guess I should not be surprised.
...
How can so many on the so-called left be so blind to their hypocrisy? Didn't they learn the first lesson about being in the reality based community: Never Drink The Kool-Aid.
Sales of Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango SUVs are so strong that their factory will stay open through the normal two-week summer shutdown. Plant employees already are working overtime and the factory is staying open for two shifts on two out of every three Saturdays. Normally a plant is closed on weekends.
Chrysler sold nearly 38,000 Grand Cherokees from January through March, up 44 percent from a year earlier. Durango sales jumped 33 percent to just over 11,000.
Fuel economy - Jeep - Dodge: 12-17 City and 17-23 Highway.
These are the height of the season Rhodies (Please ignore the stacked shingles in the background, I WILL get to that some day...). I am amazed that they are still blooming so well considering how little rain we have gotten recently. Out planting bushes the last couple of days I have found that the soil has developed the consistency of set concrete...luckily rain is forecast the next few days!
These are some plinths built last year on one end of the path into the garden. I am thinking about replicating them at the other end of the path. I have tried three different methods of cementing the rocks together and am thinking about trying a fourth; not happy with any of them thus far. Luckily, as Wright so famously said: "When Doctors make a mistake the patient dies, when an architect makes a mistake he plants vines." Needless to say, there are vines being rooted as we speak.
This is the one good way that I have found of getting rid of all of the rocks from my planting holes. Few of them are large enough to make a statement and nearly all of them are boulderesque in shape, making building projects more difficult than they need to be. Flat rocks are such a blessing!
This:
Now looks like this:
Unfortunately, rocks like that don't grow here; I had to get them from a demolition site of an old house in the next county. Pity! Stacking stones is so much easier.
My final is the day after tomorrow, so at present (as you can see) I am seeking ways of avoiding studying for it.
I happened to catch Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the girl who silenced the world twenty years ago in Rio, addressing the Worldwatch Institute's symposium on the occasion of today's launch of its annual State of the World Report.
It is a pity there is no video of her remarks available so far. She has only improved with age and may be one of very few people more eloquent on the urgency of the impending ecological disaster than her father.
Nuevo Laredo was much larger, prettier than she had imagined. She looked around and thought of the grubby border towns her late husband had told her about from his California days in the 60's and 70's. "Mike, what a difference a decade or ten makes," she thought to herself, imagining him giving her the look at her sarcasm. Jake looked around and said, "Whoa! Somehow I imagined a different Country would look different. I mean, other than some of signs in Spanish, this looks exactly like the other side of the bridge." She grinned at him, "No Jake, we haven't left the planet or anything."
The first order of business would be getting rid of these clothes, and dressing down. No reason to look ripe for the pickings on their journey. Then to off this vehicle and get something with a Mexican license plate, something more durable. She had read enough ex-pat stories by her friends to understand that rural Mexican roads could be brutal, especially after a rain, where they were going. Man, this was seriously going to tap out the cash on hand.
The big question. To head directly south, by the somewhat safer coastal "touristy" route and try and find a way to Costa Rica, or to lay over for a while with her friends in El Rebalsito? It was out of the way, for certain, but to visit Mexico and not see Tenacatita's beaches and her beloved friends there seemed a crime of its own.
This internet is a very strange thing, it has the most amazing propensity for coddling one's eccentricities. At least, that is the best use that I have found for it thus far, and I am a very eccentric fellow (I suspect).
Lately I have been dreaming of Miss Bornholm 1857. I have been visiting her for probably two years now. We often commune late at night on the internet, a guilty pleasure, but she is always just out of reach. Not merely in the sense of propinquity, she lives in Denver Colorado, but also in terms of the slightly elegant disdain she shows her admirers. There is a very real attraction in her total disregard for my existence. Heightened because it is exactly the attitude that my attentions should be met with by such as herself. Her sang froid in the face of my passion only makes me want to strip her down and discover the intricacies of what makes her tick ever the more!
Her heart, and all the rest of her, belong to Eron Johnson, and probably always will. Bastard!
The Misses Morbier 1850 and Mora 1830 (not to mention Miss Roxbury 1812, ooh la la!), were ever so much more approachable. Indeed, I actually won their companionship, but their charms have waned for me in a way that I'm not sure will ever be possible for Miss Bornholm. Ultimately, they are so happy and easy to please; not really my cup of tea at all, I suspect.
I have thought about going to Denmark, where she is from, and finding someone like her. Travelling the islands with vast circular sweeps in a red convertible under grey Baltic skies; looking for someone to sit in my car with me, someone that wants to come home with me, sit in my corner, forever more regaling me in her bell like tones.
But I'm sure that they would never be the same, plus there is all the expense of such a long journey in search of something that could never really be. I cannot speak Danish anyway. The search would inevitably be short.
For, you see, Miss Bornholm 1857 is a clock and really isn't supposed to be objectified in the way that I so commonly do with new objects of my desire.
Lessons for Innovation... If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. We can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned, American way. We're going to invent our way out, working together.
Donald Sadoway
This is pretty much what a gardener waits for all year!
I thought this one was pretty as well:
Here is one with a butterfly:
Oops! Wrong one!
Thar she blows!
We are having a really short, early season this year; blink and you could miss it! It is already eighty degrees here every day. Methinks this is just going to be a brutal Summer. In the meantime, though, we have the butterflies and hummers to buzz us, and warblers nesting in the porch ferns. It is nice to have their singing for an alarm clock every morning.
"The lawsuit was amusing," she thought as she heard the sticks cracking on shields, the clomp of the boots moving towards her in the streets of San Antonio, "but nothing came of it." Hedges lost.
They had already raided her house. Really, she always thought of herself as so inconsequential, such a no one that she was almost boastful of it. "I'm no one. They wouldn't waste their time with me," she would proclaim to the 20-something listeners to her show. She still thought of herself as nothing, when the IRS started visiting her site, thought it laughable that they would even look at someone with nothing but debt. Still thought it silly paranoia because in the overall scheme, even her 200 listens a week in podcast were nothing compared to the tide of the MSM; nothing compared to the lunatics breathing weirdness out there.
It ended up, they didn't care about those screaming about a new world order, or alien invasions... they feared reasonable, sane ideas more. They feared a no one that the smart and sane would talk to; they feared the message reaching the working class. They feared that she carried nothing divisive, no hate, nothing to "get" her on. Another case of "nits make lice," and rather than an infected blanket, they found reason to come after her under NDAA - giving comfort to the enemy, presumably by daring to criticize the USA. You see, they wouldn't go after Hedges, who brought the suit, nor any of the public figures who gave her time, Chomsky, Ayers, Churchill, Piven, or Sheehan. They wanted to shut down the people who gave THEM a platform. Never give us martyrs, rather shut down the mic checks. Stop the IDEAS from having microphones, close down those who repeated them. Writers and reporters were the enemy. They were the fuses after all, for a bomb that could go off at any time.
