FORSOOTH! THERE BE SKULLDUGGERY AFOOT!

LOAD OF WOOD CHIPS...

...DESTINATION ASHLAND POWER PLANT

MY FAVORITE CRABAPPLE

Thursday,  9:00 AM.  61 degrees F, wind NE, light to moderate.  The sky is clear, the barometer is up at 30.07 in. and the humidity is down to 69%.  It is a beautiful morning.  It warmed up enough yesterday afternoon to drive back from Spooner with the top down on the convertible, and it felt mighty good.  

   We spotted a huge truckload of wood chips travelling east on Hwy 2 yesterday, destination the Xcel Energy power plant in Ashland, where it was dumped directly into a furnace to generate power.  The plant has burned woodchips and coal for over thirty years, but only one of three boilers now uses wood, as transportation costs and market forces make it less profitable to burn wood waste.

   I continue to try to make sense out of the NSA leaks and scandal, but haven't reached my own conclusions as yet.  If something is judged so secret that it cannot be discussed, how can it be understood?
   And here closer to home, protesters of the GTEC mine intimidated officials, did some vandalism and theft and generally caused a ruckus over approved exploratory drilling.  I don't consider that an incident of civil disobedience in support of a higher moral law, but probably others do.  And there's the crux of the dilemma; unless we all have the same moral compass, how can we determine what is moral for society as a whole? We cannot.
  The government wants to protect us so badly that it seeks to take our guns away so that we cannot protect ourselves.  That is  perverted logic at best,  and I for one have a hard time believing the government is really that interested in protecting me, rather than its own interests, which are so secret that I don't know what they are.

   And the secret FISA court sounds to me like little more than a modern day version of the infamous Elizabethan England Star Chamber court, where subjects were tried in secret, without witnesses or council, and given arbitrary sentences including indeterminate  imprisonment in the Tower of London, beheading and disemboweling.  We probably aren't quite there yet, although the President has boasted of his "kill list," and it is pretty much accepted that assassinations and torture and secret foreign prisons all exist.
   And when the head of the spy agency tells the Congress he is being "as least untruthful" as as he can, it is an open invitation for us to suspect whatever our fertile imaginations can conjure up.
  I'm beginning to feel like we are actors in some perverted Shakespearean play; "Forsooth!  There be skullduggery afoot!"