Pump the Dollars
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics | Leave a Comment
One item that’s fallen off the news radar the past few weeks is gas prices — no more the hand-wringing stories of people going without food to fuel their vehicles and all is well.
Out of sight, out of mind?
You betcha.
Yesterday, I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep with the pump price still at $4.49 a gallon for regular — it’s stuck at that price and although national pump prices fell $.06 cents to $3.84 a gallon and overall prices are 1.3 percent lower than a year earlier, up here in northern California, time seems frozen.
The state average has dropped 1.7 cents to about $4.18 a gallon for regular.
An IMF consultation document reports oil and mining companies might be “under-taxed” relative to their profits and internal rates of return.
No fracking’ shit, sherlock.
(Illustration found here).
Just to keep the oil flowing, barrel prices rose with reports there’s been growth in U.S. and Chinese manufacturing sectors, creating a demand for way-more energy: Benchmark crude rose $1.29 to finish at $106.16 per barrel in New York. That’s the highest settlement price since it hit $106 on March 28. Brent crude increased 19 cents to $119.66 per barrel in London.
The drop in gas prices is due to US peoples cutting back, this while oil-related profits are NOT cutting back.
However, as long as the GOP has breath in its collective assholes, there will be no change in the tax schedule and the money keeps flowing.
No matter the harm, no matter the long-term side effects of a major f*ck-up.
Just ask the most-wonderful BP.
Via Think Progress:
Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP is reporting profits of $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2012.
…
BP has also returned to pre-disaster levels for campaign contributions.
It has nearly surpassed 2010 spending with $122,410 in political contributions so far this cycle, 65 percent of which has gone to Republicans.
Its lobbying is much more expansive, with $8.1 million in 2011, and nearly $2.2 million so far this year.
Meanwhile, CEO Bob Dudley received a raise of $6.8 million in compensation, while BP paid out $1.1 million in shares to former CEO Tony Hayward, who resigned in the wake of the Gulf disaster.
And all is indeed well in them warm, sweet Gulf waters: We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
The GOP and Mitt Romney keeps the subject on the DL.
From Politico:
What does Big Oil get in return for its $200 million investment in Romney?
It gets to keep its billions in special tax breaks every year.
So middle-class families pay twice — high gas prices when they fill up the tank and $4 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies for an industry where the top five companies combined made $137 billion in profits last year.
At the same time, Big Oil gets one of its own dictating Romney’s energy policy.
Harold Hamm, Romney’s top energy adviser, is a billionaire oil executive who says clean energy is a “magical fantasy” and wants high gas prices.
He admitted as much when he declared in 2009 that cheap oil would be a “disaster.”
Welcome the elephant to the room.
Voices of Vicious Villainy
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
As we begin a near-seven month nightmare — the 2012 elections — the US of A has become one vast holding pen of pure bullshit, creating an ironic, near-mockery of American democracy.
Not only is the political discourse so freakin’ stupid, sometimes just a pain to watch, but the distortion of so much data is beyond mind bending — and the nasty, self-centered lying coming from the right side of the political mind-set is so staggering, one couldn’t have imagined it even a decade ago.
If fact, events are so saturated with shit, last week the Republican dominated US House passed the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act, a move that would surely make Twain scream once again, this time from the grave: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”
Maybe with all that irony in his diet, John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner will have the energy to pitch another hysterical, and completely phony, temper tantrum.
(Illustration found here).
Flying clods of bullshit can be deadly, especially if one ain’t payin’ attention, and even when struck squarely in the face with a big wad of dookie (not to be anywhere-near confused with Dookie), a lot of people are either shocked out of their minds, or really didn’t feel the impact.
Ignorance without humility is most-terrifying, but arrogance born of ignorance is pant-shitting horror.
And even worse are the assholes.
Just yesterday, a well-known total quack, blubbered that Mitt Romney, who’s always called for the US auto industry to go bankrupt and has stood on that point for years, now reveals President Obama’s car-builders’ bailout was actually a Romney idea.
Via Crooks and Liars:
“[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed.
I know it infuriates them to hear that,” Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said.
“The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
Lying because assholes just don’t care, though, some call it being cynical — Karoli at C&L is more-then right on: ‘This is the cynical Romney campaign at it’s lying-est best.’
And a most-glaring example of the ‘don’t-give-a-shit‘ dysfunction at the heart of this country — nearly all of the disinformation, distorted-delusional data and bullshit has originated from the Republican party, the GOP, postulating the verbiage onto the nowadays: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Of course, Democrats are assholes, too, but absolutely nowhere-near the asshole level of Republicans.
And for reasons I can’t fathom, Democrats can also act like spineless, little turds — and although Obama is hovering near a failed presidency, he’s also nowhere-near an asshole like George Jr.
Obama’s heritage/legacy is that he’s by far the most-disappointing president in US history.
On the posture of the ugliness of the GOP, the MSM appears to have at least allowed some discourse on the subject.
A piece Friday in the Washington Post by Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and titled ‘Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem,’ narrates the plot point, but in ho-hum, MSM fashion — they never come out say these guys are really just a bunch of f*cking assholes, they try to be nice about it.
The commentary should have been written by a Matt Taibbi or a Hunter Thompson — way-more interesting and readable.
Nevertheless, Mann and Ornstein do paint the picture — a few snips:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.
In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted.
Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.
It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
…
In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.
On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship.
In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.
And in the slosh of last night’s ‘Nerd Prom,’ Mann and Ornstein also slapped at the MSM:
Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views.
Which politician is telling the truth?
Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
Of course, a lot of the shit belched out by the GOP is tolerated by the MSM, or The Villagers, as they’re sometimes called in DC and let a lot of bad stuff slide.
The authors surmise the reason behind this GOP ‘problem‘ as a building factor, starting maybe way back with Roe v. Wade, Prop 13 in 1978 California, and more recently, the rise of hard-right news organizations, yep, Fox News.
Even the actions/policies of just two small turds — Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist — were also cited as reasons behind the bat-shit crazy antics spun into the current GOP ‘problem.’
However, all this ugly didn’t really see the light of day until the 2008 presidential campaign and the arrival of Sarah Palin — all the shit finally had a conduit.
All the ignorant dumb-asses finally had a spokesperson, and even appearing from the get-go as obviously uninformed, but also carrying a simmering mean streak, Palin seemed to reflect that underbelly of US peoples who live off delusion.
And in one of those terrible quirks of historical coincidence, the Tea Party movement appeared to suck Palin’s ignorance right down to the bottom of the glass, and then continued to suck even harder.
Couple that shit with Fox News, and, presto!
Instant bullshit, and tons and tons of it — and the rest is bad-stomach history.
All with startling ferocious array in October 2008: “This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”
Apparently, Palin didn’t even pay attention or even care for her source material for that statement — it was lunacy at best, and just an out-right, manipulated lie at worse.
Either, it’s a bitch.
And then the obvious biggie — “death panels” for President Obama’s health care plan, coined via her Facebook page in August 2009 — and called by fact-checkers at Polififact as the “Lie of the Year.”
Ms Palin’s response: “The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally.”
This opened the door to similar Republican bullshit-tossing, becoming a forerunner of sorts — we all remember about this time last year when slip-knot, jerk-ass Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) slobbered out that abortions were “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
Kyle’s office then tried to trot it back, claiming Kyle’s crap was not spoken to be taken literally: “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement…” and no matter.
And Rick Santorum in February just shit on the Dutch and their euthanasia laws — inflating, exaggerating, creating an impression of a nightmare land where a fairly-good sized portion of Netherlands people are ‘involuntarily‘ euthanized every year.
Despite evidence to the contrary and creating a small shit-storm in the Netherlands, facts or anything else literally doesn’t matter, Rick was just being himself.
Santorum press secretary Alice Stewart when confronted by Dutch TV: “It’s a matter of what’s in his heart. He’s a strong pro-life person.”
Just say anything you want to, just don’t take it as literal reality — the truth is they’re lying.
These people can’t stand up under any kind of scrutiny — Sarah Palin has had only one real press conference, shortly after the 2008 election and: It was a mess.
The interview with Katie Couric a disaster — revealed too much silly, easily-spouted bullshit.
The face of Palin is Facebook.
(An aside: What about social media? Played a major part four years ago — and how about a Facebook election? People voting online — PCMag reveals possible possibilities).
Palin as a runner-up in Time‘s Person of the Year 2008 — although the rag figured it was an achievement, but way-not the way they intended.
Indeed, if Palin was anywhere near Person of the Year, the ensuing time has ironically posed this as reality:
Hardly anyone saw Palin coming.
The newspapers had to tell readers how to pronounce her name.
The culture war had gone quiet but had not gone away: conservatives had been searching for a soul mate for ages, and it sure wasn’t John McCain; the left was primed for a fight that Barack Obama seemed unwilling to wage.
Women, meanwhile, were wondering what comes next: if Hillary Clinton, the wonky workaholic with her legions of fans, could not capture the White House flag, who was next in line?
Palin broke it all open, even before she headed out to conquer what she termed the “pro-America parts” of America.
She arrived at the bonfire with the tinder stacked high, and somehow it fell to her to be the match.
Among a select cast of runners-up to the 2008 Person of the Year (Barack Obama) — Hank Paulson, Nicolas Sarkozy, Zhang Yimou — Palin has remained about the same — an ignorant loud mouth.
From The Dish in September 2008 and a record already public on Palin lying:
I know the MSM demands that we move on from the fact that someone who could be president next January has a list of public lies so extensive and indisputable that the McCain campaign has still not been able to rebut or even address any one of them, while fencing her off from the press and refusing to hold a press conference to clear the air on so many murky questions of fact that get to the core of whether this person is fit to be vice-president or president.
Read the post which has links to all the lying bullshit.
Despite the obvious, Palin can still wring shit out of nothing.
Last week, she once again took to Facebook and literally distorted a proposed Department of Labor regulation on child labor laws on farms, typing ferociously “if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”
Another factoid lie: The plan specifically excluded children who work on farms owned or operated by their parents.
Despite reality, the Labor Department nixed the plan late last Thursday after a campaign by a shitload of GOP-influenced assholes (not just Palin) caused a minor political stir in an ugly election year, thus the Obama administration caved.
Not a pretty result, however.
Via HuffPost quoting Norma Flores Lopez, a child farm workers’ advocate at the nonprofit Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs:
“We felt that these were commonsense protections that maintained the traditions of family farms and would have saved many kids’ lives.
We’re sad about it,” said Lopez, who herself was a migrant worker as a child.
“All the misinformation being put out there was really misrepresenting what these rules were.
The benefits were overshadowed.
The ones who will be paying for that is kids.”
Politics is politics, however.
Last night, Obama in his sometimes funny remarks at the Nerd Prom also chided Ms Palin and the distorted gossip-news she winks about and proclaims as truth: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” Obama asked. “A pit bull is delicious.”
No wonder trust in the so-called ‘press’ has plummeted.
Georgetown political scientist Jonathan Ladd at The Monkey Cage (h/t The Dish):
Party polarization has raised the stakes in elections.
And polarization combined with the growth of partisan media options has created an incentive for party leaders and activists to discredit the mainstream media among their supporters.
Party leaders convince their partisans in the mass public to resist informative messages from the mainstream media and ideologically hostile outlets, and instead rely more on ideologically friendly new outlets.
In doing this, they can help to inoculate their supporters against voting for the other side. Polarization created the incentive for political media criticism, but the changing media industry created the opportunity for it to be effective because there were so many non-mainstream media outlets providing alternative messages.
The GOP has gotten good at that shit, and a consequence is delusion, an attribute Republicans seek: A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead relying on their prior beliefs and partisanship to form their current perceptions.
Boy, are we in a fix.
Reality, Or Not
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
We all live by certain rules, sometimes, and to be able to live outside those guidelines is fantasy.
Michelle Obama has a thought, via CNN:
“It is hard to sneak around and do what you want,” Obama continued.
“I have done it a couple of times.
But you know one fantasy I have, and the Secret Service they keep looking at me because they think I might actually do it, is to walk right out the front door and just keep walking.”
What’s the First Lady actually saying?
(Illustration found here).
Mrs. Obama was waxing on fantasy, but not wishful thinking: “One of the things I have learned being a grown up is that you always look forward,” Obama said. “You look to where you want to go as opposed to looking back.”
What about that old chestnut: If you don’t remember the past, you’re bound to repeat it?
But we catch her drift.
And this present, past and fantasy/fact scenario got a touch personal in this piece from the UK’s Guardian last week — we don’t look at the future as us:
I’m struck by how my sense of my “present self” extends, quite specifically, for about eight years.
Me at 43 is just me at 36 with an even dickier knee; but 50-year-old me is some other chap entirely.
(In my mind’s eye, weirdly, he’s actually less bald.)
Then again, I think of next-week-me as different from present-me, too.
Many self-help tricks — such as stating your future goals in the present tense — are based on manipulating the relationship between these selves.
But would we need tricks if we could truly come to feel that all these “me”s were one?
In his book Staring At The Sun, the psychotherapist Irving Yalom suggests that this is exactly what we need to do to reconcile ourselves to the big one: death.
One of his clients told him that the revelation “came from realising it would be me who will die, not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me.”
Once we grasp that everything that’ll ever happen to us, including death, will happen to the same person, Yalom argues, we’ll make wiser choices, but also live far more intensely.
And speaking of the future, the most-delectable Onion has a rollout of problems to be encountered by potential presidential candidates for 2040 because of all the bad shit now recorded via social media — see it here. (h/t The Dish).
Nothing is fantasy and everything is fiction.
Except reality.
From the NY Times yesterday:
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades.
…
If the estimate holds up, it implies that the water cycle could quicken by as much as 20 percent later in this century as the planet warms, potentially leading to more droughts and floods.
“This provides another piece of independent evidence that we need to start taking the problem of global warming seriously,” said Paul J. Durack, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the lead author of a paper being published Friday in the journal Science.
…
Assuming that the paper withstands scrutiny, it suggests that a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past half century has been enough to intensify the water cycle by about 4 percent. That led Dr. Durack to project a possible intensification of about 20 percent as the planet warms by several degrees in the coming century.
That would be approximately twice the amplification shown by the computer programs used to project the climate, according to Dr. Durack’s calculations.
Those programs are often criticized by climate-change skeptics who contend that they overestimate future changes, but Dr. Durack’s paper is the latest of several indications that the estimates may actually be conservative.
The new paper confirms a long-expected pattern for the ocean that also seems to apply over land: areas with a lot of rainfall in today’s climate are expected to become wetter, whereas dry areas are expected to become drier.
In the climate of the future, scientists fear, a large acceleration of the water cycle could feed greater weather extremes.
Perhaps the greatest risk from global warming, they say, is that important agricultural areas could dry out, hurting the food supply, as other regions get more torrential rains and floods.
Another jab at fantasy, huh?
Power Outage
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
Early yesterday, we had a couple of power outages — pretty rare up here — and the last one occurred while working on this blog, and no post.
First time during the weekdays for more than 18 months straight — hey, not bad.
And man — when one is so used to light 24/7 dark is really, really dark.
Outside was pitch black of the purest kind and way creepy.
(Illustration found here).
Although power came back on before I left for work, the little time spent in total darkness with just a flashlight bursting the gloom was not fun, and awkward to say the very least.
We are so used to flipping the switch on everything that when there’s no response, humanity nowadays can get really freaked.
And life is going to get more freaked as we move along.
The UK’s Guardian yesterday on a new environmental report from the Royal Society on the next few years:
“The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment.
We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption … or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future”, it says.
…
The authors acknowledge that it would take time and massive political commitment to shift consumption patterns in rich countries, but believe that providing contraception would cost comparatively little.
“To supply all the world’s unmet family planning needs would be $6-7bn a year.
It’s not much.
It’s an extremely good investment, extremely affordable.
To not provide family planning is an infringement of human rights”, said Sulston.
And it’s also the old inequality question:
“The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption.
Fairly redistributing the lion’s share of the earth’s resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates,” said an Oxfam spokeswoman.
The rub here, however, is the lack of fight.
President Obama seemed to appear in a Rolling Stone interview to put climate change into the vast dish of just another issue to be dealt with “…in a serious way.”
What!
Via a small snip at Daily Kos:
That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation — that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent.
That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.
The problem Mr. President is that we should have started yesterday — it’s bullshit if there’s any real seriousness involved here.
Right now there’s no other issue as serious as climate change and why worry about economics when they will be no nothing in a real short time — the shift in how climate slaps mankind in the face.
The reason?
Shit like this:
Humans might not be to blame for the latest piece of news that has caused new concerns about global warming.
A newly-discovered, naturally occuring methane leak over the Arctic Ocean could play a role in future climate change, according to a NASA scientist.
…
“We didn’t expect to see methane being emitted from the remote Arctic Ocean,” he wrote.
According to the researchers, the amount of methane coming from the Arctic Ocean is about as big as the pockets of the gas being released from an ice shelf in Siberia.
In 2010, the National Science Foundation said that the “release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the [Siberian] shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”
And then power outages coming way-abrupt, and staying out.
Meanwhile….
HAPPY BIRTHDAY FUNNY, FUNNY LADY
The most-wonderful Carol Burnett is 79 today.
In my humble opinion, the funniest person ever — a lot of people say Lucille Ball, but she didn’t carry the laughter Burnett can and didn’t have the humanity.
Burnett is hilarious just standing there without saying a word.
The closest nowadays is Kristen Wiig, who also can just stand there, do nothing and be so, so-funny.
Burnett covered more than half-century of funny — happy birthday, gal.
(Illustration found here).
Early Sunday Evening
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
A deeply-beautiful afternoon on California’s northern coast — finally after what’s seem like weeks and weeks of rain in various forms, so far, appears like we will get a full-day’s worth of sun, and, there’s not much wind, so it’s about as good as it gets up here.
A lawn mower bangs somewhere in the distance, somewhere close out my window.
And a kind of lazy day — been listening to last.fm — jumping from one artist radio to another, mostly stuff from the ’90s, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Better Than Ezra, etc., along with the notables, Bush and Pearl Jam.
Just finished You Tubing Blur Song #2 — such scratchy, pithy fun.
I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet
It wasn’t easy but nothing is
Despite what we think.
In my humble opinion, the early to mid-1990s was one of the best ever for real rock-n-roll — dude, that’s covering a shitload of ground, yeah, so what — and this when the best stuff was produced outside the mainstream, although some of those bands, like Third Eye Blind off its first album, became big names in pop music (Semi-Charmed Life opened 1997′s Contact, the Jodie Foster movie).
I also heard a most-interesting version of Van Halen’s Jump earlier — catch it at Balloon Juice.
Performed by a band I’ve never heard of — Aztec Camera, a Scottish group out of the 1980s, which apparently has since disbanded or something, can’t find anything new from them online anywhere.
In a distant relation, also read at CNN those SS agents caught partying-hardy in Columbia were part-n-parcel of a likely assessment: All the employees are accused of cavorting prostitutes ahead of last week’s visit by Obama. They’d arrived earlier that morning as a part of the “jump team” that flies in on military transport planes with vehicles in the president’s motorcade.
Yep, might as well go ahead and jump…
And those boys jumped fast, too — in country by daylight, banging whores by dark.
And I missed the big bang this morning (find out tomorrow if anyone locally heard it):
A loud boom sounded over much of Northern California early Sunday, the apparent result of an ongoing meteor shower.
A meteor was streaking across the sky when it apparently broke up above the Earth, sending the sound reverberating across the area, said Stefanie Henry, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento.
The National Weather Service received reports of the sound across Northern California, and even as far south as Orange County, she said.
Odd that shit.
And apparently along with the bang, the incident also carried some rocking and rolling, though, without any earthquake: Erin Girard-Hudson of Arnold, Calif., told The Union Democrat of Sonora, Calif., that the loud boom that occurred around 8 a.m. made her 2-year-old daughter, Elsie, cry. “It knocked me off my feet and was shaking the house,” she said. “It sounded like it was next door.”
And included a fireball that was “…extraordinarily bright in the daylight” that accompanied the phenomenon, but even more odd was this from Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno: “People are putting two and two together and saying it has something to do with the meteor shower,” he said. “But the fireball was probably coincidental and unrelated to the peak of the meteor shower.” Though the fireball was seen over such a wide area, Ruby said it was likely just “a little bigger than a washing machine.”
Ever tried to pick up a washing machine, Dan?
Heavy as shit, and have pieces of it falling on you can’t be delightful at all.
This too on Earth Day (via Raw Story):
The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.
…
The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some conservatives almost certain to object to international interference in US domestic matters.
Well, I bet — a lot of the screaming GOP-ers/Tea Party-ers won’t stand (or sit) for anything like genocide to crop up in this country’s history, but reality is not part of their constitutional make-up.
And also most appropriate this Earth Day, ‘The Snake,’ by Emily Dickinson:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,–
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The last verse most telling.
And tomorrow’s Monday.