Where there’s smoke, there needn’t be ire

It’s back. Smoke from lightning fires in central Washington has blown east to the Palouse. We can see the hills this time, but the sky is a pale smoke grey, and the sun, while we could see it, was bright orange-red.

We live close to nature, and we love it here. Nature is temperamental, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We have  incredible, well-equipped people who can put out fires. On the west side of the state, Highway 410 had to be closed because of the fires. I am not aware of any such inconveniences on the east side where we are.

It’s okay. This is God and Nature. It’s not our turn to think we run things on this planet. I happen to know who does: my six-year-old granddaughter; and of course, our cat, Effie.

Effie, Supreme Allied Cat

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News time: Spies and Sex to the Fiscal Cliff in 17 trillionths of a second

I thought briefly that I had attained some level of news-savvyness when I could list the primary characters and their respective roles in a recent national scandal involving exceedingly low intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Army, and an apparently psychotic wannabe ambassador to South Korea from Tampa, Florida’s minor-league society.

I suspected at the time that the whole staging of this lurid pathos was a smokescreen for something else much worse going on. And behold: the treacherous Fiscal Cliff now shines through the fog. The Fiscal Cliff down which the nation is about to roll if we cannot accept the simple concept that subsidies are not deficits at all, but actually represent economic growth and real capital.

We would have to be cynics not to know that. We would be cynics to wonder why military spending should not be reduced, even if we happened to be listening when we were told that withdrawal of troops from Iraq would reduce military spending by trillions—or maybe it was billions—who remembers? And we would indeed be elitist cynics if we did not understand the importance of raising inheritance taxes—who thinks he is entitled to a head start in life that could lead to new business, jobs, and future revenues? It would be missing the whole point, which is fairness. The only fair way to distribute wealth is to distribute it to the government. Everybody knows that.

Here is a handy little primer that explains who has money, who should have control over that money, and why there is a precipice from which our fair-minded nation is about to plummet. Refreshed by a double espresso, I read it and now I understand everything.

But knowing my diminutive stature when it comes to solving problems involving 14-digit numbers, I simply passed my tiny plea on to my truly honorable congresswoman: “Drive your pitons into that cliff and hang tight, Cathy!”