Allan G. Hunter's Blog, page 19

Diary 159

Monday, August 24th

The Republican Party Convention started today, nominating the ‘president’ as their candidate for the 2020 elections. Let us be clear. They didn’t have to do this.  They could possibly have chosen someone else. But they didn’t. They know who this person is. And still chose him.

Diary 158

Sunday, August 23rd

KellyAnne Conway is leaving the White House, I’m informed. She’ll be replaced by two or three other people, no doubt. What astonishes me, though, is the way these White House presenters can say what they say without a twitch, without a blush, without bursting out laughing – and make it all seem reasonable.

I wonder what they’re like in private life. I wonder how their spouses or children deal with them. Imagine it: “No, I did not wreck the car. It’s just undergoing some updates, which it needed anyway. These were scheduled updates, just like any car. To say that it had to be towed out of a ditch after hitting a phone pole is a misrepresentation. It was taken to the garage by a professional service, and the decisions were made there…”

Diary 157

Saturday, August 22nd

Now that we’ve harvested the honey we’ve placed the empty and almost empty frames outside, and the bees rush around, excitedly eating and collecting this ‘free’ feast.  They clean everything up astonishingly well. What they can’t know, of course, is that this free honey is the same stuff we robbed them of.

So great is their enthusiasm that they’re sometimes almost aggressive. It struck me that in this they are very like us. We rush about, all excited to get our tax refunds, but what we don’t realize is that this is the tiny amount our system sees fit to lob back to us after having taken a whole lot of our wealth.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if we actually got something for them, like decent schools, free healthcare, secure streets free of violent crime, and – impossible to ask – a government that’s not intent on cheating us.

I’m just a worker bee. So I could say it’s not my problem. Except it is. We all need to do our best, and we need to have a Queen bee who is responsible.

Diary 156

Diary 156

Friday, August 21st

Today was B-Day. Harvest time. I was very cautiously attired. Even so I had a bee crawl up inside my trouser leg, and one got into my B-Day suit and headed for my armpit. I’ve no idea why any creature on Earth would want to do that, but hey, bees….

Lots of honey harvested, tons of help from the grandkids, and a splendid learning activity for all. Lots of sampling of the product, naturally. Homeschool really is rather special.  I took the pictures halfway through the process before I got too sticky. We have twice the yield pictured here. As you can see, the honey itself is still being strained through cheesecloth bags hanging in the kitchen.  It is unbelievably delicious. 

We’ve got a really neat planet.  Let’s try and look after it.

Diary 155

Diary 155

Thursday, August 20th

Steve Bannon has been arrested for fraud; Manafort is still in trouble; the Republican-led inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election has concluded that, yes, it happened.

The picture is of a huge hibiscus, about 9 inches in diameter. The second is of a huge bee, six times the size of my bees. As I took the pictures I hoped to include a Monarch butterfly. Why, I wondered, is this Monarch butterfly not perching on this huge hibiscus? The answer is that Monarchs have developed over millions of years to be creatures that only feed on milkweed, a plant many consider a weed, so they pull it up and plant hibiscus, instead. 

The Monarch didn’t stick around to be photographed. It was desperate to find milkweed and a mate. If we’re to save our environment, and the Monarch’s, we should probably bustle around a bit, too.

Diary 154

Wednesday, August 19th

The news is full, and rightly so, of the Democratic Party’s Convention. A unified party, now, it makes abundantly clear that the ‘president’ is a shameless, corrupt fraud, that climate change cannot wait, and that human rights cannot wait.

And yet some people out there still don’t accept these things as in any way valid or important. I cannot get my mind around that.

My friends in Europe keep asking me about this, to them, astonishing phenomenon and I have no decent answers for them. I can only say that what matters are not the stupid things that have been done, but the wise decisions we need to make from here on.

Diary 153

Diary 153

Tuesday, August 18th

So I admit I’m not a great gardener. My herbaceous borders leave plenty to be desired. But today as I wandered round the place with Zoe and Ellie (7 and 5). picking flowers and observing bees and butterflies, I realized that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be eminently good enough.  Across the road a five-man garden team manicured browned and dead grass, put mulch around the rain starved trees, and made a lot of noise creating a sterile space. Sometimes imperfect is better.

The bees would agree, I think.

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Diary 152

Monday, August 17th

August always makes me think of August 1914, when the world lurched towards war.  What would have happened, as Hillaire Belloc famously asked, if the armies of the world had just decided to sit around and smoke tobacco instead?

The ‘president’ is sure to do alarming things just to keep himself in the news, and make everyone with an ounce of wit angry. But what would happen if we turned away, if we said, ‘Your day is done, old man’?

What if we planned for a decent future instead of getting angry at the old git?

Diary 151

Sunday, August 16th

I confess I’m puzzled by this whole Postal Service debacle, and the reasoning behind it. If the USPS is closed/crippled by the ‘president’ and his minions then won’t that impact rural postal voters – many of whom who support the ‘president’ – disproportionately? Or is the thinking merely that people who decide to use a postal vote are forward planning, cautious of covid, and therefore somewhat more savvy than the others — and that these sorts of thinking people must therefore be Democrat voters?

My own thought? The more people realize what a shabby and irrational move this is, the less they’ll tolerate the incumbent – and they’ll turn out as never before to vote him out.

Diary 150

Saturday, August 15th

150 days. And some people are predicting we’ve go a long way to go still.

The picture is from my morning walk – the air so calm that when I first posted this I had trouble knowing which image was the earth and which the reflection. The year has reached a poise, a still point before it turns into Fall, and change. November is coming.