Sam sent me this intriguing news story about US Senate majority leader John Thune, whose family lived a block away from me in Murdo, South Dakota, population 700. Read all about it here:
Roll of the Dice
If you need to find those parts of you
particled off by life,
those strings of you that have spun off
in times of loss and strife,
address the world with that new you
and let it hear your voice.
A dirge becomes a rousing reel
depending on the voice
that chooses how to read the dice,
reflecting gain or loss
by their interpretation
of the numbers that they toss.
For the Sunday Whirl 698 Wordle Prompt the words are:
time hear lose world off string life particles reel need find
Permanent Bond
Today as I walked by a shelf in the studio, I read the glue label marked, “Permanent Bond,” and my mind flashed back to when my niece gave birth. It was very important to her that she and her husband be left alone for a few days to bond with their child. My mother, who raised three girls without once hearing the b-word gave the sidelong look but said nothing.
Then my mind flashed back further. I had been called from the porch by the wild cat I had adopted two months before and sat with her as, like a ditto machine, she pumped out three small copies of herself. After these two most intimate hours of my life, how could I have given any of the kittens away? Of these four cats, two are now long dead, but the others have been with me for 11 years and I now have a name for the warm fullness I felt for the three tiny gray kittens.
These cats who leave small piles of organs in doorways—who insist on curling up on my hip or my shoulder as I lay reading, in spite of my allergic reaction to them—who meow insistently at closed doors and shower cubicles. “Now, now, now, “ they insist. These cats who bring in baby rabbits, fleas, ticks, and the disembodied tails of salamanders to wriggle out of sight under the sofa—who bring me their infected cuts and ears torn half-way off in cat fights—who, as kittens, could curl up three to a flower pot leaving the flower intact . These cats who know how to form a beautiful still life each time they come to rest—these cats to whom, I must admit, I have become bonded.
When I try to imagine where I will be in ten years, I see myself living somewhere wild, getting to know the local animals, getting wiser. I know that much of what I’ve learned about humans, I’ve discovered through living with animals. You have to be calm. Quiet. Let them come to you. Don’t grab and don’t make swift movements.
Some might call people with the temperament to calm animals boring. But if you look closely, you might see through to the quietness that fills out their beings. They have let the calmness take over. They have ceased fighting it.
I feel what might be this calmness, but wonder if it is instead numbness. And my mind works out the answer. Numbness is filled with emptiness whereas calmness is filled with small details. The line of blue bottles on the shelf. The red leaves at the very tip of the otherwise green plant. The curl of the cat’s head thrown forward onto i’s stomach. The outflung paw. The dear face of this most beautiful cat that I saw being born.
The MVB prompt today is Permanent
Performance Anxiety: Nightmare
Bassoons are idly chuckling in the orchestra,
and in the aisle, popcorn crackles underfoot
as the last audience member hurries to find her seat.
I stand center stage
wondering what play this is
and how I came to be standing here.
The curtain opens.
I am naked.
And I have not even seen my lines!
For SOCs the prompt is “Crackle.”
Distracting the Masseur
For Fibbing Friday, the words to define are:
1. Doohickey What one does when carried away by passion as a teenager.
2. Donnybrook What you call a river as the sun first comes up.
3. Dingleberry A berry that grows in a small wooded valley.
4. Dingus What be Gus’s intestines.
5. Drub What I look forward to when my masseur comes.
6. Dreck What happen after d’ car crash.
7. Diggity What goes best inside a hot dog.
8. Dook How I usually do when I take a test.
9. Dibbly Another name for champagne.
10. Dinkum What happen before d outgo.
For Cee’s FOTD
Remembering Bob
“Wooden Heart”
He handed it to me without ceremony—a small leather bag, awl-punched and stitched together by hand. Its flap was held together by a clasp made from a two fishing line sinkers and a piece of woven wax linen. I unwound the wax linen and found inside a tiny wooden heart with his initials on one side, mine on the other. A small hole in the heart had a braided cord of wax linen strung through that was attached to the bag so that the heart could not be lost. He had woven more waxed linen into a neck cord. I was 39 years old when he gave me that incredible thing I never thought I would receive: his heart—as much of it as he could give.
It was the first handmade gift I’d ever received from a man. Inside, over the years, I have put a lock of his hair and a tiny tiny animal of indeterminate species hand-cut out of wood by his youngest son and presented to me. And, after his death, a small copper heart pin I had made and given to him two years after we married. Twenty-eight years later, this bag is all that is left of what was once my union with the man and his eight children from three different women. When he died, we returned him to the inevitable earth and all of the children returned forever to their real mothers.
The bag lies in a box with other relics of our past together: a silver heart brooch, another carved of wood with wings attached and, strangely enough, a miniature computerized hand piano. Years after his death, it struck a chord on its own, just lying on the shelf beside my favorite picture of him. One last dying gasp from the tiny gadget I’d put in his Christmas stocking but then grown tired of hearing him play and so had hidden away, only to enter our bedroom one night to find him playing it under the covers like a guilty pleasure hidden from the adults, although he was already in his sixties.
For our first Christmas, he gave me a large sculpture he had made that was also a musical instrument—three hand-raised copper gongs in the shape of breasts suspended over a wooden keyboard played by rawhide mallets, the gongs suspended from the long horizontal neck of a copper wind instrument with two necks and two mouthpieces, so two notes could be blown at once. When he died, it was the sculpture chosen by his youngest daughter, and I let her take it. Now, the remnants I have of him are only the leftovers that remained after eight children had chosen. I was moving to another country and could not hold onto everything he’d given.
Sculpture by Bob Brown,1986. 4′ X 5.5′, wood, hand forged copper, marble and hemp.
Miniature hand piano, 4″ X 2″
I moved away from most of those things we had collected over the years, but somewhere hidden away in the thousand objects in my studio is the small leather bag and the tiny hand piano, now forever mute, his father’s pocket watch, his biking medals and the other assorted pieces of his life that will one day wind up in a secondhand store in Mexico. All of our gifts finally melding with the parts of all those billions of other lives that strike their brief chord before blending, inevitably, back into the cacophony of the universe.
The prompt for RDP is “Bob.”
I am borrowing this image from a Facebook friend because it accurately depicts what I have been feeling ever since Donald Trump was unleashed upon the world. How the majority of citizens of a country could be so misled is hard to imagine but it seems to happen again and again.
Screenshot
The stock market continued to fall today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 478 points, or 1.14%; the S&P 500 fell almost 0.8%; and the Nasdaq Composite fell almost 0.2%. The S&P 500 briefly held its own in trading today, but then Trump announced on his social media platform that he was going to double the tariffs on steel and aluminum from the new 25% rates to a 50% rate on Canada and might increase tariffs to “permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”
Stocks fell again.
Unable to admit that he might be wrong, President Donald Trump is doubling down on the policies that are crashing the economy. In addition to his tariff threats, he also reiterated that “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” an outrageous position that he suddenly began to advance after the 2024 presidential election and which has Canadians so furious they are boycotting U.S. goods and booing the Star-Spangled Banner.
More than 100 top business leaders met with Trump today to urge him to stop destabilizing what had been a booming economy with his on-again-off-again tariffs. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told Jeff Stein and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post that in private, “[b]usiness leaders, CEOs and COOs are nervous, bordering on unnerved, by the policies that are being implemented, how they’re being implemented and what the fallout is. There’s overwhelming uncertainty and increasing discomfort with how policy is being implemented.”
The extreme unpredictability means that no one knows where or how to invest. Market strategist Art Hogan told CNN’s Matt Egan, “This market is just blatantly sick and tired of the back and forth on trade policy.” Yesterday, Delta Air Lines cut its forecasts for its first-quarter revenue and profits by half, a sign of weakening corporate and consumer confidence and concerns about the safety of air travel. Today, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines cut their forecasts, and American Airlines forecast a first-quarter loss.
When he talked to reporters, Trump reasserted that he intends to do what he wants regardless of the business leaders’ input. “Markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down, but you know what, we have to rebuild our country. Long-term what I’m doing is making our country strong again.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt advised, “If people are looking for certainty, they should look at the record of this president.”
Not everyone will find that suggestion comforting.
Trump backed off on his threat to raise the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50%, but went ahead with his threat to place 25% tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum products. Those tariffs took effect at midnight.
In the face of his own troubles, Trump’s sidekick billionaire Elon Musk is also escalating his destructive behavior. Yesterday Musk’s social media platform X underwent three separate outages that spanned more than six hours. Lily Jamali and Liv McMahon of the BBC reported that Oxford professor Ciaran Martin, former head of the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center, said that the outages appear to have been an attack called a “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS, attack. This is an old technique in which hackers flood a server to prevent authentic users from reaching a website.
“I can’t think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that’s fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time,” Martin said. The outage “doesn’t reflect well on their cyber security.” Without any evidence, Musk blamed hackers in Ukraine for the outages, an accusation Martin called “pretty much garbage.”
Four days ago, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded after takeoff, and now SpaceX’s Starlink internet service is facing headwinds. In February, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim canceled his collaborations with Starlink after growing tensions with Musk culminated with Musk alleging on X that Slim is tied to organized crime. The loss of that deal cost Musk about $7 billion in the short term, but more in the long term as Slim will work with European and Chinese companies in 25 Latin American countries rather than Starlink. Slim has said he would invest $22 billion in those projects over the next three years.
Also in February, after U.S. negotiators threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to the 42,000 Starlink terminals that supply information to the front lines, the European Commission began to look for either government or commercial alternatives. The European Commission is made up of a college of commissioners from each of the 27 European Union countries. It acts as the main executive branch of the European Union.
On Sunday, Musk posted: “[M]y Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” Poland pays for about half the Starlink terminals in Ukraine, about $50 million a year. Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, responded that “if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.” “Be quiet, small man,” Musk replied. “You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”
After all the tariff drama with Canada, last week Ontario also cancelled a deal it had with Starlink.
But perhaps the biggest hit Musk has taken lately is over his Tesla car brand. On February 6, Musk’s younger brother Kimbal, who sits on Tesla’s board, sold more than $27 million worth of shares in the company. Tesla chair Robyn Denholm sold about $43 million worth of Tesla stock in February and recently sold another $33 million. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja has sold $8 million worth over the past 90 days. Yesterday, board member James Murdoch sold just over $13 million worth of stock.
Fred Lambert of Electrek, which follows the news about electric vehicles and Tesla, noted that Tesla stock dropped 15% yesterday, “down more than 50% from its all-time high just a few months ago.” “Tesla insiders are unloading,” he concluded.
Tesla sales are dropping across the globe owing to the unpopularity of Musk’s antics, along with the cuts and data breaches from his “Department of Government Efficiency.” Protesters have been gathering at Tesla dealerships to express their dismay. While the protests have been peaceful, as Chris Isidore of CNN reports, there have also been reports of vandalism. Tesla owners are facing ridicule as protesters take out their anger toward Musk on his customers, and at least one competitor is working to lure consumers away from Musk’s brand by offering a discount to Tesla owners.
Trump has jumped to Musk’s defense, posting just after midnight this morning that “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 Presidential Ballot Box, but how did that work out? In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”
Indeed, today Trump used the office of the presidency to bolster Musk’s business. Teslas were lined up at the White House, where Trump read from a Tesla sales pitch—photographer Andrew Harnik caught an image of his notes. And then the same man who gave a blanket pardon to those convicted of violent crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol called those protesting at Tesla dealerships “domestic terrorists” and promised that the government would make sure they “go through hell.”
Trump and Musk appear to have taken the downturn in their fortunes by becoming more aggressive. Martin Pengelly of The Guardian noted that in the middle of Monday’s stock market plunge, Trump posted or reposted more than 100 messages on his social media channel. All of them showed him in a positive light, including reminders of the 2004 first season of the television show The Apprentice, in which Trump starred: a golden moment in Trump’s past when his ratings were high and the audience seemed to believe he was a brilliant and powerful businessman.
Today, egged on by Musk, Trump pushed again to take over other countries. He told reporters: “When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done with a ruler…and you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the United States, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that…. And then if you add Greenland…that’s pretty good.”
The Trump administration also announced today it was cutting about half the employees in the Department of Education. The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon, who has little experience with education, to head the department on March 3 by a party-line vote. Shutting down the department “was the president’s mandate—his directive to me,” McMahon told Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham. McMahon assured Ingraham that existing grants and programs would not “fall through the cracks.”
But when Ingraham asked her what IDEA stood for—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—she wasn’t sure, although she knew it was “the programs for disabled and needs.” Ingraham knew what the acronym meant but assured McMahon that after 30 years on the job, she still didn’t know all the acronyms. McMahon replied: “This is my fifth day on the job and I’m really trying to learn them very quickly.”
Musk lashed out at Arizona senator Mark Kelly on social media yesterday, after Kelly posted pictures of his recent trip to Ukraine and discussed the history of Russia’s invasion, concluding “it’s important we stand with Ukraine.” Musk responded: “You are a traitor.”
Kelly, who was in the Navy for 25 years and flew 39 combat missions in the Gulf War before becoming an astronaut, responded: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5324700/tariffs-stocks-wall-street-trump-priorities-markets
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/11/trump-tariffs-stock-market-uncertainty/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62x5k44rl0o
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/economy/us-stocks-tariffs-trump/index.html
https://globalnews.ca/news/11067542/ontario-permenant-starlink-contract-cancel/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87vg38dnpo
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/10/delta-air-lines-cuts-forecast-softer-demand.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87vg38dnpo
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-to-help-ukraine-replace-musks-starlink/
https://fortune.com/2025/03/07/tesla-cfo-vaibhav-taneja-sells-stock/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/business/tesla-vandalism-protest-stock/index.html
https://www.404media.co/facebook-cybertruck-owners-group-copes-with-relentless-mockery/
https://insideevs.com/news/748190/polestar-targets-tesla-buyers-unhappy-with-musk/
https://zecar.com/reviews/polestar-lures-disgrunted-tesla-owners-with-new-offer
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, March 11, 2025, 12:14 am.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/trump-truth-social-economy-stock-market
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/linda-mcmahon-education-secretary-confirmed/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-buy-new-tesla-show-support-musk-2025-03-11/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/economy/trump-steel-aluminum-tariffs-hnk-intl/index.html
X:
atrupar/status/1899461083670188216
GrudlerCh/status/1893986069630034067
elonmusk/status/1898612062533956047
SenMarkKelly/status/1898872403175858375
SenMarkKelly/status/1899155561171558505
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lk4uv7vyp52k
atrupar.com/post/3lk4vl4lixk24
atrupar.com/post/3lk4ukadc7s24
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 