Ain't nobody here but us chickens
The missus and I have a unique house-sitting assignment this week. We are about 30 minutes from home out in the country, at the home of my cousins, and in the company and thrall of seven chickens. The starting lineup is a rooster named Oreo and six hens, Tilly, Cici, Salvy, Rex, Olive, and Checkers. And did I mention that they have names? That places them securely in the category of the luckiest one percent of one percent of one percent of chickens living in the United States today. Chickens without names tend to not it as good as these chickens have it, or if their names are something along the lines of Extra Crispy, same thing.
And these chickens do have it pretty good. There's a coop armed with a pair of oscillating fans. An adjoining cage, or run, as they say. The water and grain is replenished at least once a day, ice packs added to the water at other times, and carved watermelon from the freezer fills the void left by afternoon tea and crumpets. We have it pretty good in the house too, with seemingly all-you-can-drink beer and wine.
Allow me to say though that the sexual politics of the chicken coop are a bit unsettling and they required advance warning. Oreo the rooster is-- at least by the standards of the office where I work-- a sexual predator. He acts the pimp, and I admit I had never before fully picked up on the symbolism of the dress style of the stereotypical 1970's-era street pimp, or phrases like cock-of-the-walk. There's no procurement to be had down
these mean streets, but he seems to be rather abusive and certainly possessive. Part of it seems appropriate according to human standards. He keeps an eye on them. He tries to step between the girls and any potential danger. At night, when they retire up into the coop, he goes with them, then comes back to the door flap and gives it one more look to make sure everybody is there. (I decided that he can't count to seven, but he can count to one, so if he comes back to the door, and doesn't see any stragglers, all is good.) Most of the hens don't stray too far from him, but then he orchestrates these surprise sexual attacks on them from behind-- I told you this was unpleasant-- they squawk, the couple has physical contact for about three seconds, they both flap their wings for a moment, then remember that they don't have the capacity for flight as their body weight is too great, and then everything is done and forgotten, and both parties return to pecking at the ground. No litigation.
We were told that Tilly, I believe Tilly, was the runt of the litter-- even though runt of the litter is entirely the wrong expression-- and that every chicken in the coop picked at her. That's why I want to say that it's Tilly that's involved in this next story, but I can't be sure. We were left by our hosts with a list of the names that also included their (to me) very-similar physical descriptions. This implied that we were encouraged to learn their names, but aside from Oreo, they all look remarkably alike. Tilly, we'll say, was minding her own business one night early this week. She was free ranging outside the cage, as they all were and are permitted to do during the day. (Incidentally, chickens have a remarkable ability to bring themselves back to the coop at the same time each evening. As reliable as the mighty ocean, they come home to roost, just like Obama's pastor said they would.) Meanwhile, I was positioned comfortably in a folding chair about four feet from the run reading one-time pitching prodigy Rick Ankiel's book about his struggle with the mysterious anxiety condition called "the yips."
On the opposite side of the vast chicken structure, Oreo starts running his game on Tilly. Again, I say it's Tilly because this appeared to be more of an attack to her front then her back. He's pecking at her head, and as I said, we were told that all of the other chickens, even the ladies, had picked on her, at least back during her vulnerable infancy in the spring. (Tilly, it was also explained, is the only chicken that has spent an overnight in the house-- in the bathtub, when she was young and sickly.) She does the wing flap, and glides towards me in the chair after the Oreo assault. She stops about six feet away and gives me a side-eyed look. (They all look at you sideways because their eyes are on the sides of their heads.) And that look, I believe, is one that's saying, "Are you going to do something about this?"
Now I was not told that this sort of thing was something I needed to concern myself with so I'm resolved not to get myself involved in this affair in the slightest. Also, I decided in advance of our stay, though I never expressed it verbally to anyone, that I would not be touching the chickens. If they get out of the cage when I open the door in the morning to fill up the water and the feed, then the free-ranging starts early today and they're out for the rest of the day, until they march back in there themselves, like clockwork, at about nine o'clock this evening, and then I'll close and lock the door behind them. Not to make this too much of an Iowa thing, but I'm just here to keep one eye on them and one on the sky to make sure they're safe from Hawks and Cyclones, as it were. So Tilly and I make eye contact for about five seconds, and then I slowly raise my book from my lap to my face and that breaks our staring contest. I'm here, but I'm not here. You feel me?
Tilly continues her wobbly trot clockwise around the run and the coop. She completes the revolution and I return to my reading. But not ten seconds later, I hear the squawk, look up and again Oreo is on her head and she flaps away in my general direction. This time it plays out differently though-- she jumps at me. She's not attacking me, of course. I'm not in danger. It's more of a "save me" leap into my arms. I fend her off quickly and now Oreo and a couple other hens have her down in a sort of headlock. Oreo is pecking at her head as she squirms and the others are joining in. It's as if they're saying to her, what did you just do? You just jumped on the water and grain guy. It's all nuts. Sure I feel a little guilty that I couldn't do more, but I was not told it was a possibility that the chickens would come at us. The chicken scrum is short-lived, as they all are, and soon all seven are back to pecking at the ground, and I'm dusting myself off. There's no blood. The skin was not penetrated, but there's a forever-chicken scratch, about an inch long, at the top of page 133 of my Rick Ankiel book (in the narrative, that's situationed after the pitching meltdown in 2000, but before Rick the Stick's triumphant return as an outfielder and home run slugger seven years later).
Things haven't really been the same on the farm since. A couple days after, Oreo leaped at my wife while flapping his wings. She doesn't know what caused him to do that, but ever since, she doesn't feel comfortable walking across the yard during free ranging time unless she's gripping the garden sprayer.
Farm time ends tomorrow. Our hosts return and we'll say goodbye to perhaps the best possible "stay-cation" that can be had around these parts. The chickens were a pleasant experience to contend with, I guess, overall, despite the episodes. They're interesting. But they also make one appreciate more the relaxed elegance of the Great American House Cat. There's one of those here too, but no stories to be told. She's just a cuddly, widdle sweetee, aren't you, kitty?
The fifth quarter winds down?
The billionaire senior executives at Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual, and IndyMac were responsible for a system of collectively making hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans, then effectively betting against them with subsequent investments. This scam wrecked the American housing industry and caused a global financial crisis in 2008. We are still recovering. Regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision, then the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and then the Federal Reserve, made no criminal referrals in the case. A
Frontline report found that the FBI didn't even talk to whistleblowers that had offered information during the investigation. Not only did the criminals at the top of the industry get away without prosecution, but systematically, most took home fat parachute bonuses as well, some in the range of hundreds of millions. Nobody seems to care about this, though. There were no pitchforks, no riots, no posses. People still express their everlasting support for the political icons that permitted the perpetrators to skate.
But
O.J. got off because he's rich. And that is a bridge too far.
At last, O.J. Simpson is out of prison and not a moment too soon either. The former professional football player and actor, now 70, is somebody that
did get prosecuted in 2008. He was sentenced to
33 years in prison for a robbery and kidnapping case involving his friend, a man who had robbed him of his own possessions, and a man that just testified
in his defense at his parole hearing after nine years of prison time. Many are outraged of course. They couldn't give two craps about the details of the Nevada case. They want Simpson put away forever because of his acquittal and widely-assumed guilt in a separate murder case that occurred 14 years previous to the night Simpson stormed into a Las Vegas hotel room and a man that didn't go to prison held the only gun. On the ESPN documentary
O.J.: Made in America last year, former Simpson defense lawyer Carl Douglas described the connection as such: "This was the fifth quarter. They got us back for winning our case." The judicial system of the United States also permitted "double-jeopardy," in this case by trying Simpson a second time for the Brown/Goldman murders in a civil trial that handed down a $33 million penalty. Hmm, that number again... a $33 million judgement, and then a 33-year prison sentence in a separate case. But there was no link between the two, right? I promise Americans that support this garbage that while it's frightening to consider a so-called "murderer" on the loose, it should be even more frightening to live in a country where criminal sentences are handed down for perceived offenses entirely peripheral to those on trial. There's nothing in the Bill of Rights that suspends for "make goods."
If you're still hung up about what you perceive as a subversion of justice in the Brown/Goldman murder case, target your ire. This was a criminal case during which one of the detectives, the first on the scene, was caught on tape not only slurring African-Americans after he claimed under oath that he hadn't, but, lest we forget, and most importantly, admitting that he
planted evidence in cases he had worked and believed that lying was sometimes a necessity on the witness stand. (I've never been sure how this planting evidence disclosure qualifies as "the race card.") The Simpson jury was not even allowed to hear the most inflammatory recordings, ones in respect to the officer's boasts to having done violence against "niggers" and committing police misconduct on multiple occasions. As a result of the audio presentation of his deceit under oath in this same trial, he returned to the stand and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked if he had planted evidence
in this case-- and then was subsequently convicted of perjury over his false testimony. And you believe that the jury delivered an improper verdict in the Brown/Goldman trial?
Baltic eyes are smiling
7/18/17 update: Right on cue,
Glenn Greenwald reports on the new alliance between the most militant neocons on the planet, the men that led us into Iraq, and the Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party. Both groups love Israel, the Saudis, the Syrian rebels, and war, and they despise Donald Trump and Russia. You know some of the names: Michael Chertoff, Bill Kristol. The group is proudly "bipartisan" so what is there for us to fear. A money quote from Glenn: "Even if Trump could be brought into line with neocon orthodoxy-- which has largely happened-- his ineptitude and instability posed a threat to their agenda."
-
The Democrats are not even capable of
putting their eye on the ball, let alone keeping it there. Still with this Russia nonsense. The retro-xenophobia and the attempts to escalate tension between the two countries that simply does not need to exist. We are not at war with the Russians, just as we are not at declared war with anybody else. The Russian Federation no more influenced the U.S. election in 2016 than
Ukrainian nationals influenced it on behalf of Clinton.
What you’re seeing in the world right now are flailing attempts to resuscitate the Cold War, a faction of Deep State agents in the U.S. let down by the election of Donald Trump, who cares more about doing business with Russian oligarchs than declaring war on them. His motivations create their own problem, but the violence that results is less quantifiable. The electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton was a crippling blow to the plans of the U.S. Security State to get our military and our espionage agents behind Ukraine and its separatist plans for Crimea.
Was it wrong for Trump’s son-in-law to meet with an attorney in Russia that represented private entities (but not the Kremlin)? I believe it was, but certainly it wasn't by the standards of Washington. Is it also wrong for Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, to serve on the board of Burisma Holdings, the largest natural gas company in the Ukraine? Trump employs his son-in-law in a capacity that clearly violates the 1967 White House nepotism statute, but Democrats have now gone limp in their opposition to Jared Kushner as a de facto member of the Trump cabinet. They have little political cover to stop it ever since Bill Clinton named his wife de facto Secretary of Health Care in 1993. The corruption is so pervasive across parties-- and across national governments-- that it all amounts to a complete blur. It’s called capitalism, and corruption is its natural state. The United States and its intertwined corporations are no more a neutral player upon the geopolitical landscape than Russia and its companies.
Now, what is this Russian BS distracting us from? Well, let’s start that discussion with what it’s designed to distract us from. Even if they are guilty of what they’re accused of, and there’s been no evidence provided to the public confirming that they are, the Russians' “hack” of the U.S. presidential election was not alleged to be a hack upon voting machines or upon the voting results. The criminals in that particular legal case are the American companies, and the politicos they’ve purchased, that have eliminated the paper trail of ballots and made our elections
so vulnerable to attack. What are Democrats doing about that problem in the wake of this "scandal"? Continuing to take the money of the companies that make the electronic voting machines, that's what. Instead, the alleged “hack” was upon the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee, with no evidence existing, except in the minds of losing political consultants, that the election was swayed one way or another by their reveal, and that, more importantly, revealed the misdeeds and campaign tampering that was done
by the Democratic National Committee. The more we talk about the Russians, they reason, the less we talk about the DNC's misconduct and lapse of ethics.
Next, it’s distracting progressives from the necessary restructuring of the Left and the permanent banishment of their sellout representatives. The nationwide campaign strategy of “you’re to our Right, you’re racist, you’re to our Left, you’re sexist,” and "we're going to blame everybody but ourselves," has worked wonders to rid Washington D.C. and most of the 50 state capitols of feckless Democrats, but perhaps it’s time to select a new path.
It’s also distracting from our government’s real crimes-- the supplying of arms to Saudi Arabia to help annihilate the Saudi kingdom’s slave state, Yemen; the
attempts by Congress to slip major giveaways to defense contractors, the legitimate attempts by some to separate Donald Trump from his private business that keeps him in violation of federal law, the failure of anybody in Washington, outside Bernie Sanders, to push for Single Payer health care while
Republican lawmakers get busy buying up health insurance stocks.
We need to start considering whether Democrats are losing on purpose. I’m being very serious about this. The Intercept reports that Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who is still pushing to steer Democrats to the right, runs an investment firm, Stagwell Media LLC, that is
buying up Republican-centered consulting companies. And who is standing in the way of Trump's impeachment on any number of legitimate offenses? If you think it's Republicans, you're only half right. The DNC, internally, believes impeachment proceedings would negatively impact the mid-term elections for Democrats.
There's no end in sight to the Russian distraction, and it's worth noting for context that the attacks haven't been limited to Trump either. 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has faced innuendo and sneers for traveling to the Kremlin and meeting with the Russian president. Again, for the DNC, it's about blaming anybody but themselves for their electoral failures. The relentless media drumbeat against anybody opposed to the entrenched Democratic Party power structure makes a person wonder if there isn't something of significance to the fact that the Ukrainian-- anti-Russian-- meddling in the 2016 election has been almost completely ignored, and that America's influence upon foreign elections continues to be a perennial non-issue. By the admission of Victoria Nuland, a diplomat in the Obama State Department that also, interestingly, as a top foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the U.S. has spent
more than $5 billion(!) since 1991 influencing elections-- in that's in Ukraine alone.
Burning down the house
A
nother Independence Day has come and gone, but this one felt different… sounded different. In Iowa, fireworks are legal to buy and detonate within the state for the first time in decades. I haven’t driven into Missouri for about three months, but I assume that, in the meantime, the warehouses of explosives that have cozied up to the state border for years have all gone belly-up, or are now selling methamphetamine instead... selling it out in the open, that is. Incidentally, I’ve always wondered this: if Missourians want to buy fireworks, do they also have to drive to the border?
In our Des Moines condo, during summer, the high velocity cooling system tends to drown out all indications of an outside world, but the sound of these first-year, grade-A firecrackers are successfully able to penetrate the walls. Beyond the exterior of our building on Tuesday, it was Aleppo. I was afraid to peer out but what I imagined could be seen was a sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic, dystopian netherworld-- only wide scale destruction and some Humvees driving downtown dwellers like my wife and me to safe passage. The city was finished shooting off their works next to the river at 10 o’clock, and that’s when the ordinance that permits private use says those explosions are supposed to end as well, but for another good hour after, it continued to be, truly, just one pop after another, as if the municipal display had never ended. Most were probably being set off near the public housing complex up the street, but the way the noise ricochets off the bricks and concrete and pavement in the city, it could have been coming from blocks away.
As I drove to work early Wednesday, the toasted remains of the Moon Travelers, Tasmanian Devils, and Red Rhinos laid upon the streets. As I failed to steer adequately around one or two of the shards with the Civic, I hoped that none would go off belatedly, like so many IEDs on the byways of Iraq. There was still so much smoke in the air that I could barely see the debris to avoid it. As I type this, it is now July 6th, and after 10 o'clock in the evening, and I still hear crackling outside the house.
Insurance investigators now speculate that a fire gutting a Des Moines home earlier in the week may have been caused by fireworks. Stay tuned. Tickets were issued in Cedar Rapids to people who threw fireworks from cars, and in Marion, IA, a person was cited for setting a trash dumpster on fire with his party sticks. In Waterloo, where they're always trying to top the rest of us, a woman was shot in the shoulder by a stray bullet that came at her in the middle of the civic fireworks barrage. Any initial confusion on her part would have seemed logical to me. A man in Sioux City lost a hand on the Fourth when one of his timed explosions mistimed, and a six-week-old child in Swisher, IA took on serious burns, fractures, and a broken femur, when, we can only presume, the baby failed to shoot out the detonator on a Comet Storm with her .22. A GoFundMe campaign has been started to aid the family, and I can’t imagine a more American story than this one. Privatize the fireworks displays after you’ve already privatized the health care needed to pay for the multiple surgeries required to save a baby from a bottle rocket that was shot sideways into her internal organs, rather than up and into the night sky.
It’s all worth it, of course. Sure, young children are terrified of the appearance and sound of fireworks. (As they should be. Children possess many irrational fears, but this isn’t one of them, as the earlier story demonstrates.) Dogs and cats are visibly anxious. Many military vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder say they don't appreciate the festive explosions that purposely mimic a firefight, but the Fourth of July isn't really about them, is it? I say you're the one that’s “butt hurt” if I can’t trivialize their anguish by play-acting “the rocket’s red glare” next to my septic tank.
The industry of fireworks retail is sure to bring tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars to the state of Iowa. No more staring up at Missouri on all of the economic charts. As point-of-purchase displays go-- at the big box stores, firecrackers are now making the sports cards and sticker books shelf look like a clearance rack. The sudden influx of high-denomination greenbacks flowing into state coffers is going to enable lawmakers at the Capitol to withdraw their highly-contentious tax on libertarians. Farmers will start rotating the corn and soybeans in their fields with what’s sure to be a bumper crop of Triple Whistlers (if it doesn't rain). And we can finally build that wall between us and Missouri. We’ll make those “Show-Me” pricks pay for it, too.
