Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The National Guard is not Batman.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

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You are here: Home / Garden Chats / Sunday Garden Chat: Sunny

Sunday Garden Chat: Sunny

by | 116 Comments

This post is in: 

marvel sunny sunflower
.

From faithful commentor Marvel:

With the heat wave upon us in the Willamette Valley (90s for the weekend, low 100s by Tuesday), my gaze falls upon the sunflowers — a reminder of the GOOD stuff that comes with plenty of sunshine….

marvel Sunny2
***********

Here on the opposite coast, it’s daylily season. The daylilies in my yard are blooming fiercely, but we’ve been getting strong showers that batter the best blossoms before I can take proper pictures. Considering there was a ‘microburst’ on the other side of town that took down a whole bunch of trees (and power lines, and the house roofs and cars they landed on) I can’t complain too much…

What’s going on in your gardens this week?

Reader Interactions

116Comments

  2. 2.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @JGabriel: Damn. Always liked his stuff.

    Had an old friend die last wkend and then my ex-MIL died as well. She and I had a…. complicated relationship over the years that grew into one of mutual respect.

    My ex was unable to make it to the funeral as she still has at least another year to go in Chillicothe (prison). Her husband died a few months ago as well, which I am sure caused her to do a little happy dance in her cell as the c-sucker beat her on a semi-regular basis and his death left her financially secure.*** I know I did a happy dance. It was almost enough to make me believe in Jesus. If I despised that POS just a little more I might take the effort to find his grave so I could dump my cat’s litter box on it, but really, he wasn’t worth it when he was alive and he sure as hell ain’t worth it now.

    *** financially secure until she gets out. Then, if the 2-3 years didn’t teach her anything she’ll blow thru it in just a few years.

  5. 5.

    Mary G

    We got a tiny bit of rain yesterday morning, not even a drizzle, but it smelled so good.

    Beautiful sunflowers, Marvel!

    ETA: I am picking my first full-size tomato I’ve even grown from seed today!

  7. 7.

    raven

    It poured here yesterday, our maters have been the best they’ve ever been so it will be interesting to see how that impacts them.

  8. 8.

    tybee

    the damn wood rats are giving me a run for the tomatoes.
    i’m about to resort to chemical warfare.

    i wonder if assad is in a selling mood.

  10. 10.

    raven

    Who is the tall, dark stranger there?
    Maverick is the name.
    Ridin’ the trail to who knows where,
    Luck is his companion,
    Gamblin’ is his game.
    Smooth as the handle on a gun.
    Maverick is the name.
    Wild as the wind in Oregon,
    Blowin’ up a canyon,
    Easier to tame.

    youtube.com/watch?v=Tfz5tv_dfLA

  11. 11.

    raven

    @tybee: I nailed a big sucker in a snap trap Friday. I have setting those suckers but it seems to be the most effective.

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: All that rain should give them an influx of water causing them to swell and then splitting the skins. If you have any close to ripe, you probably want to pick them.

  15. 15.

    tybee

    @raven:

    these vermin no longer venture into the capture traps. don’t wanna put snap traps out due to birds. i’ve resorted to 2nd amendment solutions on few but not many are diurnal.
    dog loves to chase them but he doesn’t spend the night out – otherwise he and the racoons would keep the neighborhood up all night.

    now i’m off to see if the redfish still bite after the deluges here this week. lies to follow…

  16. 16.

    satby

    Loved pretty much everything James Garner ever did, RIP indeed.

    We’re having the first stretch of non-rainy days since the snow melted and I have to drag the hose around and water today. I have several green tomatoes on my container plants, harvested lots of onions with more to go, the lettuce is done so I’m letting the last of it go to seed for next fall. But my blue potatoes will probably be a total loss, the critters started digging them up as soon as the vines got a decent size. I’m really pleased with the results of seed starting my bedding plants this year, my hanging baskets and deck boxes are lush with flowers.

  19. 19.

    JPL

    @satby: Yes he does.

    I put in my tomato plants in late so still no produce but I have plenty of beans and sugar peas. The cantaloupe are starting to ripen so I’ll eat a few and send them home with friends and relatives.

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Raven: I am partial, but the food is seriously good too. I have a cousin in STL this wkend and am going up to meet them there for lunch. Yum yum…

  24. 24.

    Botsplainer

    Everything turned out OK with my daughter. She had a couple of friends stay over, she apologized for being stabby over it, and may have had a significant experience that propelled her into maturity.

    It was a helluva shock. I got the feeling that she really rose to the moment with regards to dealing with it (and the sisters of the deceased) at the time.

    Thanks to everybody’s well wishes and kind thoughts.

  25. 25.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    I’ve discovered the identity of the little orchids that are popping up in our yard. They seem to like shady spots under the big spruce trees.
    Helleborine Orchid
    They’re not too showy but add some variety to the violets and lily of the valley in those areas. My sister says they’re an invasive non-native and I should tear them up but I think they’re kind of cool. Gardening by benign negligence has worked for me so far.

  26. 26.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Botsplainer: Glad to hear that. I once had a neighbor across the street blow his brains out. Was looking at him sitting in his easy chair thru the front window for 2 days before somebody came by to check on him. Nice guy too.

  27. 27.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JGabriel:

    One of my favorites. I especially loved 36 Hours and The Americanization of Emily. Oh, and Grand Prix. RIP.

  32. 32.

    currants

    Garlic question! Had harvested my garlic last week (76 heads…er..”trombones led the big parade…”), hung it to dry in the shade of the sufficiently-generous eaves of my garage (outside, not in, because there’s no ventilation inside), and…yeah, that rain Anne Laurie was talking about? They got soaked. So for any of you who grow garlic: they’d been drying for a bit more than a week. Am I starting over for how long they have to dry (3-6 weeks), should I move them into the garage before the next time, or just keep on, it’s all part of the process? Thanks in advance for any suggestions (away at a conference til Mon will check in when I can).

  35. 35.

    Josie

    @Mary G:That is a proud moment and a delicious one. I’ll never forget the first tomato that I grew from seed and how good it tasted. It hooked me forever on vegetable gardening.

  36. 36.

    Botsplainer

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    My paternal grandmother was a suicide after her third year of dialysis. She was never an easy person, hadn’t talked to her sisters for 35 years, pitted my dad, aunt and uncles against each other for amusement, ridiculed their spouses, and went through multiple estrangement periods with each son that generally lasted 3-5 years. When she died, she was living with my aunt.

    She was a clean freak (I can confidently say that you could eat off of her bathroom floor at any moment of any day, so long as you didn’t mind the flavor of bleach), so she went calmly out to the end of the drive on trash day, carved the dialysis shunt out of her wrist with a kitchen knife and bled out into the trash can. No muss, no fuss. My aunt found her slumped over the can coming back from the grocery, but it was too late.

    We did learn from the nephrology community that her method of carving out the shunt is a fairly common occurrence for dialysis suicides.

    My aunt said she actually thought something was wrong because Grandma was being kind, thoughtful and thankful that morning when she left for the grocery – completely out of character. They kept the house – I don’t know that I could have.

  42. 42.

    Baud

    @Botsplainer:

    True. But truth in advertising requires that AL change the title of this post to Sunday Garden Chat: Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Rain.

  46. 46.

    Pogonip

    OK, cat people, here’s one for you. Two cats, face to face maybe six inches apart, one curled up like at a mouse hole, tail wrapped around it, the other one standing, tail down and moving slowly. Fur flat on both of them. Crouching one making loud “WAOW!” noises, like Steve whining for tuna but much louder. After about 5 minutes of this, standing one turns and walks away slowly. Crouching one gets up and follows, also walking very slowly.

    What just happened here? These cats are both completely feral, if that helps, and I’m not sure of either one’s sex.

  47. 47.

    Randy P

    @WaterGirl: I was a huge fan of Rockford as a kid. And then they showed “The Americanization of Emily” on TV one day (costarring with Julie Andrews) and I was awestruck that he did *movies* too. And with a big star like Julie Andrews!

  49. 49.

    Randy P

    @OzarkHillbilly: I didn’t know squirrels even liked tomatoes but last year we ended up in a race with the little buggers for every one. Had to eat most of them green if we wanted to eat them at all.

  50. 50.

    Glidwrith

    @tybee: Talked with a neighbor yesterday – he says if you put up an owl house that the vermin problem is dealt with quite definitively.

  53. 53.

    Elmo

    @WaterGirl:
    I always loved him because he bore more than a passing resemblance to my Dad. He was a little taller (6’4″ to dad’s 6’1″) and maybe a trifle better looking, but only a trifle. Much the same build and features tho.

  54. 54.

    WaterGirl

    @Randy P: That’s funny. Kids see the world in such a great way. This is really taking me back in time, and I’m a little sorry at the moment to not still be a kid.

    @Baud: James Garner was the best. Why did your “manly men” comment make me think of the movie Airplane?

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @Elmo: Smiling at the picture of your dad in my mind…

    P.S. I had no idea James Garner was that tall!

    Edit: For years Murphy’s Romance was the movie I would put on if I had trouble sleeping. I’d get up, put the VCR tape in, and settle in on the couch. I loved his voice and it was seldom long before he put me to sleep, but if he didn’t then I got to watch a nice movie. Win-win.

  57. 57.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    I Googled. Didn’t see a connection. But there are so many good jokes in that movie, I’m sure I can’t recall half of them.

  58. 58.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Randy P: Every year I have to fight the chipmunks for them. That Alvin is one persistent son of a gun! Couple years ago we had a bad summer, hot hot hot hot HOT and dry dry dry dry DRY! I think my maters were the only source of water for a half mile at least. The little buggers weren’t even waiting for them to ripen.

    PS: canned 14 pints of beans yesterday, Emerite green, French Haricourt, and Rattlesnake. Purple beans are just getting started and my Italian Rose are looking really good too.

  59. 59.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: Yep. I think of Airplane as the best bad movie ever made. I think I had seen it a million times before I noticed “whacking materials” at the newsstand.

  60. 60.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @Glidwrith:

    Too bad you are nowhere in my neighborhood – I’ve got around 20 orchids in my house and there’s always room for one more!

    I’m near Detroit. Any orchid that volunteers to brighten my yard is welcome. Not sure how these would do indoors, though.

  63. 63.

    Cervantes

    Sad day, part the second:

    Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza. People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive.

  64. 64.

    Botsplainer

    Fuck, this Malysian crash thing is moving fast.

    The rebels have grabbed the bodies and diverted them to Donetsk.

    Awful people, trying to concoct a conspiracy after a monumental fuckup as cover.

    As we speak (modern Russians acting like they do), recovered credit cards are undoubtedly being hit, passports are being sold for criminal use and victim families are going to have a hellish time reaching financial closure with no bodies to prove the deaths if there is activity on those fronts.

    The separatists are forgetting the first rule of separatist movements – build some international sympathy for your plight outside of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” true believers and groupies.

    I don’t care how much natural gas Holy Russia sells Central Europe – if those bodies aren’t produced, there will be a grassroots groundswell for extremely punitive economic sanctions that those governments won’t be able to ignore.

    It will be a rocky couple of weeks.

  67. 67.

    Cervantes

    @Botsplainer:

    The rebels have grabbed the bodies and diverted them to Donetsk.

    Are you referring to something other than their moving the bodies out of 80+ degree heat and into refrigerated train cars?

    (Not that I trust them even with that.)

  68. 68.

    Amir Khalid

    @Botsplainer:
    Some of that backlash is already starting. It looks to me like the separatists lack the discipline to be under close control from Moscow, however much Putin and his man in Portland might wish they were. I doubt Moscow would have been happy to see them tampering with the crash site, and making it impossible not to conclude that they had something to hide.

  69. 69.

    Botsplainer

    @Cervantes:

    The only reason they were rotting in the heat was interference in investigation and recovery by separatist militias.

    @Amir Khalid:

    Complex, crew served weapons platform requiring specialized training. Interference with recovery.

    It all makes Putin look bad, and Putin ain’t a man who likes too much amateur hour. Strelkov needs to buy a Geiger counter and hire a food taster.

  70. 70.

    Bobby B.

    I hope your Willamette Valley isn’t the one I live near (your weather report sounds identical). These days an angry glare will set off a forest fire. Those weatherbeaten Art Robinson signs will burn like oily rags, as well as the old “US Out Of UN” signs.

  71. 71.

    Cervantes

    @Botsplainer:

    The only reason they were rotting in the heat was interference in investigation and recovery by separatist militias.

    That is certainly part of it, I agree. It’s difficult to credit any of their actions.

    Regarding R., the literary archaeologist who’s making you proud, here’s something you may appreciate:

    Henry, DeWitt, & James Alan McPherson, eds.
    Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men.
    Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.

    You might also enjoy an old issue of Granta that was devoted to the subject of fathers.

  73. 73.

    Mike in NC

    @Botsplainer: Interestingly, I just received a poster from an eBay dealer in Donetsk, Ukraine. I had to Google the name of the town and learned it’s located right near the Russian border and it was recaptured by Ukrainian forces just a few weeks ago.

  74. 74.

    Mike in NC

    @Cervantes: If I’m not mistaken, James Garner once publicly made some disparaging remarks about fellow actor Ronald Reagan. One more reason to like the guy.

  75. 75.

    Thoughtful David

    @Amir Khalid:
    The alternative of course, is not tampering with the crash site and it *proving* they had something to hide.
    So they’re going with second-best: tamper with the site and everyone will suspect they had something to hide, but have no proof.

  76. 76.

    Cervantes

    @Mike in NC: From his memoirs (2011):

    Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That’s no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.

    At one point, there were people who wanted Garner to run for governor of California — but he demurred.

  79. 79.

    Amir Khalid

    This doesn’t seem a good idea. Has the writer looked into whether, and on what grounds, FIFA can yank the World Cup away from a host country — especially in the absence of issues directly related to football? If FIFA were to do rhis, I imagine a lot of important business people would be unhappy. Some might not be the kind to express unhappiness by strictly legal means.

  81. 81.

    Roger Moore

    I don’t have a garden, but I do have a couple of hummingbird feeders that have been wildly successful. I’ve never had a lot of luck with my feeders until this year, and now I’m having trouble keeping up. They each hold a quart, and I’ve had days where I fill them up before going to work and find them empty when I get home. I’m trying to figure out how many birds must be coming by for that to happen, and I keep getting an answer somewhere in the hundreds. They must be coming for quite a distance to get that many.

  83. 83.

    debbie

    I just listened to Kerry on Face the Nation. Totally cringing every time he said “the social media.” Get off the sailboat, jackal.

  84. 84.

    max

    OP: my gaze falls upon the sunflowers

    Very very nice! Lovely, in fact.

    max
    [‘I haven’t had any luck with sunflowers.’]

  85. 85.

    WaterGirl

    As I was making breakfast just now, I caught myself singing “riverboat ring your bell, fare thee well Annabelle, luck is the lady that he loves the best”.

  92. 92.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Amir Khalid: The “separatists” are partly just local garden-variety thugs, of a type that’s been prevalent in the Donbass for decades now. The area is a mix of Soviet-era heavy industry (i.e. coal mining – the local football team is called “Shakhtar”, or miner) and barely more than subsistence farming. Rural areas like where the plane crashed may be 20-30 kilometers from Donetsk, but Donetsk may as well be Paris. People have their home and small plot, some livestock, and subsist, participating pretty little in the cash economy. Some tough with a gun comes by and says “look the other way” and they do. There is some control of these gangs by guys like Strelkov, the GRU officer, and other basically mercenary elements, but travel two kilometers and some other tough guy is in control. As I said, this Mafia-style “government” has been there forever, and is the milieu which Yanukovych rose out of.

  93. 93.

    Yatsuno

    @Amir Khalid: A better (and less popular) answer would be for the Dutch to boycott should they qualify. And then hopefully another number of countries (including the US) follow suit. But yanking an event awarded years ago? Didn’t this get discussed with Sochi and essentially determined to be an impossible thing?

  94. 94.

    JWR

    Anybody hear what John Kerry said about the ME conflict on the Clinton Guy’s show this Morning? Gawd. He sounds more like an Israeli SoS than America’s. Disgusting.

  95. 95.

    CaseyL

    Sad to hear Jim Garner has died. I was too young to realize The Rockford Files was meant to be a stylistic departure from the machismo of earlier detective shows; I just liked it a lot. And his movies with Julie Andrews were great fun.

    My garden? My two little gardenia bushes have died, but the other plants seem to be doing OK.

    The soil is awful, all clay and rock. When I started the garden, I dug a 1.5′ hole for each plant, and filled the hole with compost. I wondered at the time what would happen when the roots outgrew those mini-oases. If all I lose are the gardenias, I’ll feel pretty good about the survival rate.

    This is a long-ish term project, rehabilitating the soil. The project is not helped by kitties using the area as a litter pan, nor by squirrels digging up plants in search of peanuts; nor by the fact that I’m a lazy, non-hands-on gardener.

  96. 96.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    “Natchez to New Orleans, livin’ on jacks and queens, Maverick is the legend of the West!”

    It’s been my earworm since I woke up this morning and heard the sad news lead NPR’s Sunday Weekend Edition newscast.

  97. 97.

    Amir Khalid

    @Yatsuno:
    I don’t know if this issue will still be live, or near-enough live, in four years. Nor can I see a national Football Association acting off its own bat on this. FIFA would come down on the KNVB like a ton of bricks. (The Football Association of Malaysia doesn’t even have this option, alas; we’ve never qualified to begin with, we’re not likely to qualify any time soon, and no one would notice if we weren’t there.)

    I think you’d need pressure from a majority of the Confederations (the continental bodies like UEFA, which both Russia’s FA and the KNVB belong to) to force FIFA to act on this.

  98. 98.

    Marvel

    @currants: Re the garlic: I’d be especally careful to not let the bulbs get rained on again — there’s a danger that they’ll rot before they dry sufficiently (I lost a whole planting of garlic after a rainy Spring whilst it rotted away under drying skins — nertz). Keep them in a protected, well-ventilated spot until their wrappers are good & dry and their stalks have all browned out. Good luck (and good garlic!)!

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @Yatsuno:

    Didn’t this get discussed with Sochi and essentially determined to be an impossible thing?

    With Sochi, the suggestion to yank the Games was made a few months before they were set to start, which made stopping the games a practical impossibility even if the political will had been there. The World Cup is another 4 years away, which is plenty of time to prepare an alternative site. As a practical matter, almost any country with a serious professional league could host a bare-bones World Cup in existing venues provided enough lead time to schedule the games.

  100. 100.

    WaterGirl

    @Cervantes: Yeah, I followed some of that back-and-forth in the previous thread.

    My take is that the person was looking for a Gandhi with a capital GANDHI, one leader that everyone would follow, someone we would know by name, like Nelson Mandela.

    A few years ago I felt like the whole thing was too complicated and I didn’t really have an opinion. Now t hate what the country of Israel is doing; I hate what they have become. They have truly lost their way.

    Some troll-like person in a previous thread in the past few days said something like (not to me) “you all hate that Israel exists”, and I thought, no we hate Israel for the actions it is taking. Not at all the same.

  101. 101.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne: Just returned from taking Tucker for his walk, and snatches of that song were my earworm the whole way. James Garner was a good soul and it came through as he acted. I am really sad to lose him. :: sniffles ::

  102. 102.

    Roger Moore

    @WaterGirl:

    Some troll-like person in a previous thread in the past few days said something like (not to me) “you all hate that Israel exists”, and I thought, no we hate Israel for the actions it is taking.

    Maybe we don’t all hate that Israel exists, but I’ve concluded that it was a mistake from the beginning. Israel was founded on the flawed idea that it was fine to dispossess the Palestinians to create an explicitly Jewish state. I understand why people wanted that, but the country was founded on a historical wrong that can’t be corrected, and I don’t think the problem Israel represents can be solved without dissolving the country.

  103. 103.

    Johnny Yuma

    Microburst? That took down trees? Are you sure you don’t live in the Amazon rain forest?

  104. 104.

    Amir Khalid

    @Roger Moore:
    I agree with you 100% about the founding of modern Israel being a mistake. And with your assessment that only its dissolution can address the problems its existence has created. Alas (also like you, I suspect) I don’t see how Israel could be dissolved now, even if the countries involved would agree to it, without creating a new set of problems for the Middle East.

  105. 105.

    Cervantes

    @WaterGirl:

    My take is that the person was looking for a Gandhi with a capital GANDHI, one leader that everyone would follow, someone we would know by name, like Nelson Mandela.

    Right, and that search is, to put it as kindly as I can, ahistorical.

    Speaking of which, can you imagine that at one point we were told to produce Jewish GANDHIs?

    Here’s Labor Zionist Hayim Greenberg’s take on that in 1939:

    Let me cite the words of one of Gandhi`s disciples and colleagues who, just before he was sent to prison, declared: “We can thank our lucky stars that we are fighting the British and not someone else, for the British have something in them to which we can appeal.” […] A Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise, could “function” for about five minutes — until the first Gestapo agent would lead him, not to a concentration camp, but directly to the gallows.

    To paraphrase: A Palestinian Gandhi in the Occupied Territories, should one arise, could “function” for about five minutes — until the first Israeli settler would lead him, not to a concentration camp, but directly to his death.

    Here’s Patrick O’Connor (writing in 2005; it’s only gotten worse):

    In the U.S. media, Palestinians generally aren’t allowed to speak for themselves or to articulate their historical narrative. Israelis, however, are permitted to speak, to explain the Israeli experience and even to explain about Palestinians. As a result, the Israeli story is known in the U.S. while Palestinians are dehumanized.

    The reporting by the New York Times, often cited as the standard for U.S. media, typifies the problem. The Times publishes daily news articles on Israel/Palestine, including countless articles about armed Palestinian resistance. However, the New York Times and the U.S. media more generally almost never report on what 99.5% of Palestinians have done every day of their lives for the last 38 years — nonviolently resist Israeli occupation.

    Over the last three years the New York Times has published only three feature articles on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. This despite the fact that Palestinians have conducted hundreds of nonviolent protests over the last three years throughout the West Bank against Israel’s construction of the Wall on Palestinian land, and despite the fact that the Israeli army killed nine Palestinian protesters, wounded several thousand protesters, harassed and collectively punished villages that protested, and arrested hundreds of protesters, including nonviolent protest leaders.

    Yet those non-violent protest leaders weren’t named GANDHI — nor did they even wear loin-cloths — the posers!

  107. 107.

    gelfling545

    @Roger Moore: I have been trying to think of an occasion upon which western meddling in the Middle East produced any good result in the long term, even for the meddlers themselves much less for the inhabitants of the region. At the moment I can’t think of any. I’m not all that well versed in the history of the area so maybe there are some but the screw-ups have been enormous and the costs have been high.

  108. 108.

    Cervantes

    @Roger Moore: We agree, in general, but let me ask you about this:

    the country was founded on a historical wrong that can’t be corrected

    Was the United States founded on one or more historical wrongs that can’t be corrected?

    In general — in the US, say, or in Israel, or in Australia, or in Rwanda — do historical wrongs have to be corrected, or can we settle [*] for addressing them somehow, or even just stop adding more wrong every day?

    [*] No pun intended.

  109. 109.

    Cervantes

    @gelfling545:

    I have been trying to think of an occasion upon which western meddling in the Middle East produced any good result in the long term, even for the meddlers themselves

    It might be instructive to take a look at the balance sheets, 1940 through 1990, say, of the Bahrain Petroleum Company, or the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company, or the Texas Oil Company, or Aramco.

  110. 110.

    WaterGirl

    @Johnny Yuma: It was a microburst (straight-line winds, whatever you call them) that took down my 100 year old silver maple a year ago, and it was about 7′ in diameter.

    I had another one here early last week that blew some plants over and pulled roots out of the ground, but thankfully no trees. No trees left in the backyard to blow down. It was weird, though. Stuff was blown down in different directions, so something interesting was surely going on in my backyard. Again.

  111. 111.

    WaterGirl

    @Cervantes: What you wrote:

    In the U.S. media, Palestinians generally aren’t allowed to speak for themselves or to articulate their historical narrative.

    … reminds me of how much I miss UP with Chris Hayes. He actually had women at his table, more than once, speaking from the Palestinian perspective, and it was very powerful. I can’t bear to watch his nightly news show – or Rachel – anymore. Something about prime time seems to dilute/ruin what was great about both of them.

    I had high hopes for Up with Steve K at first, but even he seems to have way more traditional guests – more of the usual suspects – so I no longer watch that, either. So discouraging.

    Edit: I didn’t mean to ignore everything else you wrote, I was nodding my head as I read, but I realize you can’t see that.

  112. 112.

    Cervantes

    @WaterGirl:

    So discouraging

    At least one thing is better than it was in 2005 (when that article was written): we have slightly better access to sources that are more reliable.

    There’s Democracy Now (radio, TV, and Internet).

    There’s Al Jazeera on the Internet and on TV (for example).

    The problem is that, although you and I have access to these sources, others don’t — or don’t avail themselves of them.

  113. 113.

    tybee

    @Glidwrith:

    we have owls in the neighborhood: great horned, barred and screech.

    but perhaps having a family or two in the yard would be good. we’ll look into that. thanks for the suggestion.

  114. 114.

    Roger Moore

    @Cervantes:

    Was the United States founded on one or more historical wrongs that can’t be corrected?

    In general — in the US, say, or in Israel, or in Australia, or in Rwanda — do historical wrongs have to be corrected, or can we settle [*] for addressing them somehow, or even just stop adding more wrong every day?

    I think the case of Israel is worse in many ways than the US or Rwanda. The big historical wrongs done by the US- slavery and the treatment of Native Americans- can at least be addressed within the framework of the country as we know it. There’s no reason that blacks and Indians can’t be free and equal citizens, or that we can’t try to make some kind of compensation to them for our historical wrongs. You can even make a strong argument that our historical wrongs were going against our founding principle of equality, so that addressing our past misdeeds strengthens our commitment to our founding principles.

    That is not the case for Israel. As an explicitly Jewish state, Israel is founded on the principle that Palestinians don’t deserve to be able to live there as free and equal citizens. Israel can’t be simultaneously a Jewish state and one that lives up to modern ideas of democratic equality. They are incompatible ideals in a way that can’t be simply and easily finessed.

  115. 115.

    Cervantes

    @Roger Moore: Again we agree, but let me ask about the following:

    I think the case of Israel is worse in many ways than the US or Rwanda. The big historical wrongs done by the US- slavery and the treatment of Native Americans- can at least be addressed within the framework of the country as we know it.

    Within the framework, and yet not within it: at least re slavery, we amended our Constitution.

    And speaking of that …

    Israel can’t be simultaneously a Jewish state and one that lives up to modern ideas of democratic equality. They are incompatible ideals in a way that can’t be simply and easily finessed.

    Crux of the matter.

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