How Does Your Garden Grow? Do You Have any Bees?

My original idea was to frame this as a national inquiry into the health of bee populations in suburban and rural areas.  Surely colony collapse disorder must be associated with commercial beekeepers who hire out their hives to farmers in need of their services.  Because American farms use a plethora of dangerous and unhealthy pesticides, even produce that is labelled as organic may contain any one of as many as seventy-three chemical compounds commonly used to control pests and weeds.  I am extremely interested in the bee populations in your neck of the woods.  I am happy to report that the San Diego coastal palisades remain host to European Honeybees, Bumblebees and Carpenter Bees.

Carpenter Bee

But, of course this is just a shameless gardening post.  My pride and joy are my Lipstick Hibiscus purchased from the Mission Hills Nursery founded in 1911 by Kate Sessions, presumably direct descendants of true Hawaiian stock.

Just as close to my heart remains my prized Arctostaphylos Manzanita Dr. Hurd, a northern California native.  It's the only Manzanita I can keep alive.  This is how it blooms in early January.

My wife refuses to believe that peaches won't grow near the coast.  Here is a picture from happier times.  Last night the local canyon racoons feasted on our ripe peaches and washed their dirty faces in our birdbath.

Tomatoes from seed.

Any pepper will turn red if allowed to ripen.  We grew Anaheim, Pasilla, Jalapeno and Serrano.

And of our beloved California natives, including the Holly-leaf Cherry and the prized White Sage, Mrs. Junior's favorite is the Mimulus.  However, she claims that this Hawaiian pink only occurs in cultivars.  The true natives are either golden or Indian paintbrush red.

She did promise her Dad that we would grow some corn, which was fine with me.  You can tell when the ears are pollenated when the silks turn red or brown.  Right now, they almost look big enough to sell.

Of course we didn't want the crows to get them, so I had to hire Screech the Owl to look after them.

And we could never support such a healthy ecosystem featuring lizards, red-headed finches, mockingbirds, morning doves and assorted migratory birds without two Retrievers to keep the cats at bay.

 Chauncey

William

It's easier than you might think to grow chives.

And just as easy to grow your own green onions. 

All under the watchful eyes of my new BFF, Pepito, the San Diego Alligator Lizard.

And my twenty-three year old California Fan Palm.  Washingtonia Filifera.

A Victory for Safety and Common Sense

If you follow California politics, you will undoubtedly be aware that the inactive San Onofre nuclear power plant will be permanently closed and hopefully safely decommissioned at a tremendous cost over the course of the next few years. This plant has continuously supplied electric power from its activation in 1968 until January of 2012. There was never a serious accident or threat to workers or neighboring communities during that time. The only real ecological damage done by the facility, other than the enormous whole in the beach and the blight of an enormous structure on the coast was to raise the temperature of the adjacent ocean waters in what was undoubtedly once considered a very innovative approach to cooling the vast byproduct of heat associated with reactor power. The relatively uneventful and small leak of radiation from brand new yet defective steam pipes manufactured by Mitsubishi late in 2011, had it occurred in an earlier time of lesser awareness and a more complacent political climate, very likely might not have caused a permanent closure, but only a short period of repair and renovation. Because this all happened on the heels of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, issues of the safety of San Onofre were first and foremost on the minds of Californians. Concerned Californians at the recent meetings of the California Public Utilities Commission as well as protesters did not forget the Fukushima disaster. I recall after watching the horrifying tsunami and reading about the citywide release of dangerous amounts of radiation, one of the first things I did was to look up earthquake history near San Clemente and Oceanside California. Of course, our local republican congressman, Brian Bilbray advocated bringing the poison fire steam generator back on-line at the earliest possible day.

Here are some of the things that I found. The San Onofre nuclear power plant is located at the northwest corner of the County of San Diego at approximately 33.4⁰ latitude and -117.6⁰ longitude, just south of Nixon’s Western White House in San Clemente on the northern tip of the twenty miles of coastline occupied by the mostly undeveloped Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton maybe about fifty miles NNW of beloved La Jolla and UCSD. We often laughed at the huge “titties” of the radiation containment domes, clearly visible from that desolate stretch of I-5. This is obviously in a very active earthquake corridor. The largest local earthquakes have occurred in the Mojave desert, but several dangerous earthquakes have been centered right on the coast in nearby metropolitan Los Angeles, notably the devastating Northridge Earthquake which miraculously occurred at 4:31 a.m., January 17, 1994 on the federal holiday, MLK Jr. Day, thusly limiting loss of life. Read for yourself about the widespread damage done to parking structures, tall buildings, homes and freeway overpasses. This led to the earthquake retro-fitting of every freeway overpass and bridge in Southern California. These L.A. quakes are easily felt throughout the southland to the Mexican border. I live within bow and arrow distance of the famous San Andreas fault, but have little to fear because there is no subduction of techtonic plates in a north-south running faultline. I was much more threatened by the possibility of nuclear radiation leaking from San Onofre just over fifty miles away from my home in the event of a large offshore earthquake. Here is my evidence.

September 7, 1984 an offshore earthquake with a magnitude of 4.8, the first entry of the table I cited, occurred at 32.94⁰ latitude and -117.81⁰ longitude, approximately 31.7 miles due west of Torrey Pines State Beach, at a distance of about 33.3 miles from the failed San Onofre nuclear reactors. Sure, nothing we know of happened to the facility. Units two and three were on-line for the second of the thirty-eight years they provided electricity in 1984. But no one can say what might have happened anytime in the next one hundred years in the event a major Southern California earthquake anywhere within fifty miles of the facility.

I Love Code Pink

But let's face it, Code Pink isn't protesting the sadistic policies of Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld.  They're not reminiscing about Abu Ghraib or Bagram.  Fallujah or Baghdad.  The kangaroo trial of Saddam Hussein.  The murder of his two sons.  They're going after our guy and his C.I.A.  His Joint Chiefs.  His Pentagon.  It has been long enough.  The policy of American exceptionalism has to end now.  It is not moral to hold the world to one standard of justice and fair play and wholly exempt ourselves from any responsibility to international laws and treaties.



My friend, Che Pasa has offered an affectionate criticism of Obama and the policies of his administration entitled, "Documenting the Atrocities."  It's a good starting point.  He always has something important to say.  He doesn't say it in a way calculated to hurt other people.


I'm not really gifted in the same way.  I need your help.  I don't fucking get it.  Obviously we have all been tolerating these assassinations with their uncontrolled collateral damage as somehow necessary or possibly even justified; the dark underbelly of the insensate beast that is the C.I.A./Pentagon.  Maybe you haven't been so passive in your acceptance.  I don't think I ever anticipated that we would still be talking about this in a second term for Obama.  I understand that one man, not even the president, can really change the trajectory of U.S. national security; the forces that are at play with powerful government and military agencies.  No more than the captain of a large vessel can throw himself in the path of the rudder or challenge the monarch that has commissioned him.  But it is time for the American people to weigh in.  Make our voices heard.  And it is time for the United States of America to take part in international treaties that insure justice and humane treatment for all peoples of the world.



It's not right.  It's not acceptable.  It's probably not legal.  If it happened to us, we would massively retaliate.

Under Bush, the U.S. refused to ratify Kyoto and claimed exception to the International Court.  That's because they were the bad guys, right?  The fucking war criminals.  Obviously there would have been dozens, if not hundreds of cases brought before the Hague.  It's time for a new Geneva Convention or some equivalent meeting of the United Nations.  If drone warfare is not something to be condoned, this needs to be agreed upon by the nations of the world.  Is it right to conduct assassinations in countries that are not engaged in warfare, declared or undeclared?  If the rights of innocent civilians are already protected in Geneva Convention Protocols, should not the U.S. be prosecuted for indiscriminately violating these protections?


I hate this monster John Brennan.  I hope he goes down like a Viet Cong company engulfed by a flame-thrower.  Like the little girl hit by napalm.  Like the innocent Iraqi young men rounded up and shoved into prisons that practiced torture like it was all in good fun.  I hope the son-of-a-bitch never works again as long as he lives.  Carl Levin asked him quite simply if he believed that waterboarding was torture.  His response was a torture of slowness.  He said something like the word "torture" is politically inflammatory.  What a dumb, fucking monster.


In a related moment of American shame, whatever select Senate committee that is privileged to the deepest, darkest secrets of the American exceptionalism model was just subjected to some kind of horrifying legalistic logic that somehow justified drone strikes.  Irregardless of all that has happened in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.  I recall the tortured legalistic logic that John Sununu and Alberto Gonzalez used to justify torture, extraordinary rendition and illegal detention.

We can do better.  American doesn't have to be the dragon.  Killing muslims and their families only creates more terrorists that hate the United States and their allies.   I thought that we learned that painful lesson ten years ago.

Let's All Celebrate MLK Jr. Sunday and the Second Inauguration of BHO

Greetings to all. Lot's of reasons to celebrate this weekend. The most important being freedom. May we always remain a free and united people. I guess it has been four years since I created what I consider to be my greatest blog post to date on the Dog Report, entitled Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Blogging. The excitement of four years ago has not diminished in any way for true believers. There is much to do and many bridges to build, but we can again unite as a nation and push forward into a brighter future for all citizens. Had a wonderful time in church this morning. I coaxed my old pipe organ into something resembling a gospel organ sound and actually cut loose fairly respectably on We Shall Overcome. I thought it would be fun to check the WNYC website for news this morning. Happily, I stumbled upon this amazing series of never-before-released radio interviews with Dr. King recorded in 1961. You will find synopses of the four interviews which inform the listening. I am listening to the first interview as I type. It is deeply personal and very biographical in an important way to anyone who cares about the modern history of our republic. Enjoy. And soldier on for justice brothers and sisters. We are climbing Jacob's ladder.