Spencer and Iran

Florida man tells police
he can’t resist secretly
filming women’s behinds.

I am thinking of renaming our cat, Spencer. I am going to call him “Iran.” You remember Spencer, perhaps, as I blogged about him previously, “The Trouble with Spencer.” Spencer showed up at our door one morning and has been with us ever since. He supposedly belonged to our neighbor but they say their cats (they have several) do not like him. They also apparently do not like him and encouraged us to adopt him (as it is he has adopted us). Our other four cats don’t like him either. Our other neighbors also don’t like him as he visits their bird feeder (but usually fails in his attempts to catch a bird). I don’t know why no one likes him, he seems just like any other cat to me. Spencer doesn’t attack anyone. He just minds his business, comes in and eats most everything in sight (we’ve been calling him Spencer the Dispenser). As he has apparently never been an indoor cat, he refuses to stay in the house after he has eaten. Our other cats mostly ignore him, except for Claire who will pick on him at every opportunity. He never fights back, preferring instead to retreat. So Spencer has become a pariah, with but one rather implacable enemy. See, he’s just like Iran, with the Israelis never letting up on them. They insist repeatedly that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Now they insist there are Russians helping them. The problem is that the IAEA says there is no evidence whatsoever they are building a bomb. Scott Ritter, a previous Iraq inspector, more knowledgeable about such things than most, says they are not building a bomb. Our own intelligence operatives also do not believe they are building a bomb. The Russians have recently indicated they will go along with sanctions against them. Our latest claim they have been building a secret facility for enriching uranium has been shown to be false. But still, like our poor Spencer, no one seems to like them or believe them. There are those here in the U.S. who keep insisting we should attack Iran militarily, or at least allow the Israelis to bomb them. The keep insisting no matter what they are told about Iran’s innocence and compliance with the international rules about nuclear energy. I simply do not believe Iran is trying to build a bomb, nor do I believe that if they did have a bomb they would do anything with it other than regard it as a purely defensive measure (a defense against Israeli and U.S. threats against them). I do not believe they need to be treated as a pariah, any more than I believe Spencer should. Spencer is coming around. Today when I was sitting in the garden he jumped into my lap for the very first time. I believe Iran will prove to be just as friendly if given a chance. After all, our history of abusing them has not been pleasant.

Of course the hawks seem equally determined to keep us in Afghanistan, apparently forever (good for business, you know). Some of the generals seem to be embarked on a campaign to force Obama to make a quick decision (in their favor of course), and if he does not he will be accused of unnecessarily sacrificing American lives to that dismal situation (they conveniently overlook how many lives will be lost if we continue our endless and pointless “war” there). I guess it might be the case that Obama faces more monumental problems, all at once, than any President in history: recession, depression, Iraq, Iran, Korea, unemployment, racism, health care reform, right-wing idiocy, and so on. No matter what he does it is a given that the Republicans, who have no interest in the welfare of the U.S., or its citizens, will oppose it and hope that he fails. I believe this is unprecedented, that is, that one party publicly wishes that the country would fail. In the past, it seems to me, both parties wanted the country to succeed, but differed in the means whereby that success could be achieved. Now we have a party that simply does not want our country to succeed, period, and they are not afraid to publicly say so, how disgusting.

Harvest season here at Sandhill. Generally speaking it was a good year for the garden. Not good for corn or cucumbers for some reason, and not truly great for beans, but most everything else did well. A great year for plums and apples, so-so for pears, great for asparagus and squash (the winter squash got away from us somehow and we harvested 42 different specimens today (we shall have to give most of them away). Tomatoes, too, were unbelievably prolific. Carrots did well, turnips and rutabegas not so great, and as usual summer squash were so successful we could not keep up with them. I would have liked a better harvest of potatoes but they were not bad. Autumn is the best time of year here, beautiful days, not too hot, colorful leaves beginning to fall, crisp but not cold, the peaceful, bucolic, comforting knowledge that the hay is lying in the fields soon to be in the barn and we will all be able to endure still another winter. The snow is slowly creeping down the mountains, the bears will be hibernating soon, the elk will be bugling and moving down from the higher ground. I love autumn most of all.

LKBIQ:
Fiery colors begin their yearly conquest of the hills, propelled by the autumn winds. Fall is the artist.
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

TILT:
The musky odor that emanates from male muskoxen is used to attract females during the breeding season.