Author Archives: lifelessons

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About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

The Numbers Game #25. June 10, 2024, Please Play Along!!

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Sanctuary

Click on Photos to Enlarge.

Welcome to “The Numbers Game #25”  Today’s number is 146. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find under that number and include a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.

This prompt will repeat each  Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below.

The China Bulldog was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards

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Books2024. New Generation Independent Book Award Finalist:
The China Bulldog And Other Tales of a Small-Town Girl
(Prose, poety and images of growing up in a small town in South Dakota. )

 

 

I just discovered that my book The China Bulldog (Available on Amazon and at Diane Pearl’s)
was a finalist for the 2024 New Generation Indie Book Awards in the Memoir category. 

If you think Biden has not accomplished anything, please read this post by Annie Asks You that I’m reblogging.

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https://annieasksyou.com/2024/06/03/while-we-were-obsessing-about-trumps-fate-what-was-joe-doing/?page_id=15405

Misnomer, For The Sunday Whirl, June 9, 2024

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Misnomer

Red dragon of my garden, ascending walls and rocks,
seeking out a birth chamber on your extensive walks.
Your strategy is lethal, for the shelter you find best
proves you as an enemy—a thief of life and nest
of bee or wasp or other insect where you’ll lay
your eggs where larvae of your host will become the prey

of your eggs when they have hatched into larvae too,
long after you have left to resume adventures new.
Wingless wasp, you never soar aloft in air,
but your vivid color hints at the despair
of any who receive your sting, so painful that you’ve earned
the title of “Cow Killer Ant” as victims have soon learned.

Cool water will not stem the pain, nor will anything
soothe the throbbing torture of your defensive sting,
but unlike your insect victims, humans will not face
a fate more dire than pain that is extensive as you race,
channeling your power into a new direction,
tunneling into the ground to escape detection.

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 658 are: strategy enemy thieves red dragon air hint water rock nest face channel

Although commonly referred to as the cow killer ant or red velvet ant, this insect is actually a wasp. They get the “velvet” part of their name from the fuzziness of the females, which are wingless and often brightly colored, appearing like a red and black ant. The powerful red velvet ant sting is what has led them to be nicknamed “cow killers”. The female will enter the ground nest of a host species, typically a wasp or bee species, and lay her eggs near the host’s larvae. As D. occidentalis’ larvae develop, the species’ true parasitoid nature is shown. The larvae grow and develop by feeding on and killing the larvae of the host species. [13] Velvet ant larvae will continue to feed until they enter the pupal stage. In this stage, larvae continue to grow into adults. Pupation typically takes 23 days, and most velvet ants are mature and ready to reproduce themselves after this. [15] Velvet ants have an interesting mating style compared to other Hymenopteran species. The male has no parental care responsibilities and the female leaves as soon as she lays her eggs. This is not out of the ordinary for a Hymenopteran species, but velvet ants are though to be monogamous and semelparous. This means females mate just once in their lifetime with only one male. Many entomological organizations suspect velvet ants to mate only once in their lifetime.[16]

(Thanks, Wikipedia, for furnishing research on these insects. I think I’ve seen three in the past 23 years and did an earlier post on the orange and black variety I discovered on my wall many years ago. This one I found near my kitchen door just a few years ago.)

Schefflera Bloom For FOTD

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Schefflera actinophylla, umbrella tree

Although I had these trees in California, they never bloomed like this. I love seeing them but have none around my house. This photo was taken at my friends Harriet and Paul’s house.

For Cee’s FOTD

Old Feelings

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Old Feelings

Our prairie  town  stood
in an unending stretch of South Dakota plain
that rolled on for as far
as any eye could see
with not one tree.

Here I dreamed
in the crouched shade of rabbit nests
and killdeer flight,
in the shade of the feigned broken wings of mother birds,
in the shade of tractor blades and haystacks.

This was where  I  would sunburn  and sand stick and deer fly scratch.
Where the ticks waited for me on the wood of the thickets.
Where no dangerous animals lurked
since the gray wolves were ghosts
and the brown bears memories.

Here the Sioux were sequestered in the bars and the reservations.
The horses were safe behind fences,
the cattle wore the tattoos of their owners,
and  feral  cats  were the only descendants left
in the decaying houses  of the homesteaders
of half a century before.

The  floorboards of my Grandmother’s  homestead
sagged  to the dry dirt,
and the roof and timbers
fell  to blanket them.

The ribs of  plows  rusted
in the spring  rainstorms.
Prairie fires burned away  rust
and  snow peeled away ashes
to the muscle of iron
which it picked at like scabs—
iron to rust to ashes to iron to rust.

Kicking the hard clods with my feet,
I knew that under me were arrowheads
and flint strikers
and white stone buttons
in the shape of thunderbirds—
All the rich Indian treasures
buried under the soil
to be turned up some day  by the plow of my dad .

Curled up into the furthest corner of the couch,
I listened to the stories traded between my dad and his friends.
Tales of gray wolves
and children lost in snowstorms,
Indian wanderers and recluse homesteaders
to be lifted out of my dad
like he lifted the Indian relics from the soft soil.

And I feel a part of the prairie dogs and the wild kittens,
the rabbits and the killdeer in their nests.
I feel both threatened and protected by the land––
like a child given asylum under the shadow of trees.
Like myself sheltered in the arms of  the child  I’ve grown from.
That child who, wanting to grow up and feel  less,
Comforts its  grownup self,  who wants the feeling back.

For dVerse Poets Open Link Night.

Paper Shoes for Ragtag Daily Prompt, June 8, 2024

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Paper Shoes

I’m folding me some paper shoes
so I can walk away the blues.
The love poems I cannot recall
I’ll scuff off as I pass the mall.
Someone will find my words all shredded–
how you wooed and won and bedded
one so young and so naive
that she could not help but believe
words pilfered from a Hallmark store
that you had often used before.

All those lovelorn lines obscured.
All that loneliness endured.
On Main Street I will shed my heart—
that part of me you tore apart.
All the lines I wrote about it,
all the times I grew to doubt it.
Your words the heel, my words the sole,
the sidewalks will consume them whole.

All the futile poetry
that passed once between you and me
ground into the pavement where
perhaps two lovers will find it there—
the words like seeds that hung around
hoping for more fertile ground.
Love sprouted from a used-up word
might strike some others as absurd,
but I like to think perhaps
our use of them was just a lapse.
Repeated by those other voices
who choose to live by other choices,
all those words that we now rue
might work for lovers who are new.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt, the subject is Paper

Some Vital Information on Who Best Serves the Everyday American. Read This!!!

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Image by SJ Objio on Unsplash

If you are considering voting for Trump in spite of all of his past illegal actions because he is “such a good businessman,” please read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” below and then subscribe to her free newsletter. Subscribe for free to  Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com

Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.

The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period. 

The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number. 

The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged. 

Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.

These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment. 

The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933. 

Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better.

But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters. 

With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles. 

Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.

But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”

As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system. 

Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.

In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward. 

On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system. 

The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years. 

Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration’s outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”

 

Subscribe for free to  Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/07/may-jobs-unemployment/

https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/jobs-report-may-06-07-24/index.html

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/jobs-report-may-2024-us-job-gains-totaled-272000-in-may.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-gift-disclosures-harlan-crow

https://fixthecourt.com/2024/06/a-staggering-tally-supreme-court-justices-accepted-hundreds-of-gifts-worth-millions-of-dollars/

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

https://apnews.com/article/treasury-income-taxes-irs-audits-direct-file-04c3b4b55ca0d37b2c40697a392c78aa

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/06/07/biden-harris-administration-releases-data-showing-historic-gains-health-care-coverage-minority-communities.html

https://thehill.com/business/budget/4652668-extending-trumps-tax-cuts-would-cost-us-trillions-of-dollars/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/donald-trump-big-oil-executives-alleged-deal-explained

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/trump-oil-industry-campaign

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/politics/trump-biden-affordable-care-act.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/06/07/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-may-jobs-report/

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Tradescantia, FOTD June 8, 2024

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For Cee’s FOTD

Hibiscus Family, for FOTD June 7, 2024

1 Reply

For Cee’s FOTD