Good morning on this snowy Sunday.  We got about 4 inches with another forecast.  We got the car and the patio cleared first thing this morning and I can see the shovelers with the landscaping company out.  They will have the outside walkways and the street cleared quickly.  We saw the latest massive multi-car pile up--outside Denver this time.  I can't remember seeing so many in any season before.  The pictures from California are mind blowing.

For a bit of philosophical contrariness enjoy this post form Druid Life.  We used to say that giving a man a fish and he eats for a day but teach him to fish and he eats forever (at least as long as there are fish to catch).  I remember a few months ago Vice President Biden used the same phrase in praising a job training program.  I wondered, though, how long the "skills" the program would be teaching would be in demand (long enough for the students to graduate and get a job?) and exchangeable for money which would be exchangeable for the food the worker needed to live.  So in our modern world we do abstract work (often for people far removed and unknown to us) to create final products (broadly speaking) we don't see and have no ownership of for another abstract substance (money) we have to exchange for the tangible goods we can no longer make ourselves and don't even understand the making of.  How much more abstract can our existence be.

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Monday now.  Didn't have much to say yesterday.  I did get the potting area and my first tray of paper pots filled.  Also trimmed dead branches off of my rosemary.  It looks so much happier upstairs with a lot of new growth.

So much of the news has been about the Oscars.  I didn't watch and I didn't see any of the films up for the award.  Actually I haven't seen any Oscar nominee since Return of the King such a long time ago.

The other major story has been the Ukraine.  It isn't that I am uninterested in it.  Rather I am irritated with the coverage which has been simplistic and bombastic and largely uninformative.  I did have one flash of irritation when a Ukrainian-American insisted (in an interview) that the U.S. must keep the peace around the world.  Hell, NO!!  It is well past time to let go of the illusion of superpower status.  The talking political idiots are talking about "isolating" Russia and I ask: how much can the EU isolate a country that controls much of their gas and oil supplies?  James Howard Kunstler has a few cogent remarks on the situation here and here.

The Agonist has this to which I can only say AMEN!!!!  We have become more and more irritated by the infotainment industry which dominates our (s)news.