“We could not have guessed that critically massed rich men, once they sit in meetings together apparently can’t control their own behavior: They can’t make themselves stand up against what is wrong.” — Carol Bly

Carol also said adolescents need to be unstable. She says or said: “They need to be willing to weigh opposites, willing to drop authority and willing to become and stay ‘self-organized.’ ”

Robert Bly receives a lot of notoriety, and his poetic influence is strong, however Carol’s ethic concern, I believe, far outweighs him. She doesn’t want them to grow up and not be able to stand up against what is wrong.

I found it interesting the other day to read that a TV channel had dedicated some history to Saddam. A Shiite said Iraqis didn’t need such a satellite channel because it has “hostile intentions,” while another, a Sunni high school teacher, said all his family felt sad from photo images of Saddam’s execution and pictures of his two sons and grandson meeting their end. Saddam’s hanging three years ago occurred on the first day of Eid al-Adha, a most important holiday of the Islamic calendar.  It did little to win favor with the Sunnis.  If I remember correctly, I had trouble watching that play out on television in spite of who he was.

The other day I talked to a gentleman who suggested the wrong people are getting the bailout. I didn’t have to ask him what he was talking about, and no doubt others would agree.

It was interesting to see questions remaining over the pork workers’ illnesses. I’m assuming they have been compensated.

And now I see that Ethanol’s boom goes bust. Craig Cox, the Midwest vice president of the Environmental Working Group tells us; “Frankly, the industry was overbuilt during the glory days of 2006.”

They conclude that they will “weed out some of the weaker plants, but the strong will get stronger.”

Now what does this mean?

It’s almost painful in a way to see the 160-acre farms that used to occupy the land, give way to the mammoth farms that occupy the land along with new tractors that don’t resemble tractors anymore that almost operate by themselves.

They look scary.

This is progress?

Fortunately, snow will soon cover the fields, but there won’t be as many fence posts sticking up with threads of barbwire running through, except they, too, have probably been altered.

I’m relieved that I have given up hunting.

I remember as a kid when a neighbor hung a deer in our old wooden dirt floor garage. It didn’t excite me.

It made me wonder. And Lydia wasn’t impressed when she would see a deer hung up at the Poppe farm. Our boys don’t hunt, and I’m okay with that.

Another thing that is missing are the little grocery stores that used to occupy small buildings around town.

Fortunately, we still have Knauers located across the street from the shoe fixer and leather-patching people.

Now if we could do something to avoid the killings one gets to read about almost daily in the papers.

I almost finished the book by the author who spent a tour of duty in Iraq with soldiers assigned to be part of the “purge” and how they fared. The book ought to be required reading for federal legislators before they vote on whether or not we are taking the right course, if there is such a course.

Our daughter expresses concern regarding Obama’s response to Afghanistan. She is more concerned, as we are, for her husband, who’s currently training for a tour of duty that could send him to Iraq. She believes after that tour he could possibly be called to Afghanistan. We hope not.

“Our superhuman greed and vanity, the hubris of our will to power. We struggle to achieve values, which are not really values at all, in order to destroy things on which our whole existence as human beings depends.”—Kafka