Milking the system

As I grow older, I am finding it harder and harder to stomach politicians, government leaders, company leaders, and religious leaders who lie, blatantly, to our faces, as though we are plain stupid. Whether it's the USA or Norway, or any other modern country, it seems to me that greed has become paramount among the upper echelons. Maybe it's always been this way, or maybe I'm just getting more and more fed up with it. Average citizens are paying high taxes in Scandinavia and we're told that it's to fund infrastructure and healthcare, among other things. But if you do a bit of digging, as some of the dedicated journalists do, you find out soon enough that a good percentage of the money that should be used for infrastructure and healthcare, is actually going into the pockets of leaders of state-owned organizations who give themselves and their cronies (whom they hire as high-paid consultants--it's called corruption) extremely high salaries, or expensive trips to other countries (flying business class of course) that they defend as necessary in order to 'learn how' the other countries do things like build bicycle paths or fund schools. Or they sponsor Christmas parties where the wine and liquor flow freely--all at taxpayers' expense. It infuriates me, especially since most average citizens are living on a budget. I can tell you that we are not flying to other countries several times per month, nor are we sponsoring and defending high-end Christmas parties. In other words, most average people (non-leaders) are not milking the system the way our leaders are.

Where do they learn to do this? Is there no accountability anymore, no sense of justice, no conscience, no ethics, no morals? How can leaders justify giving themselves huge raises, while denying underpaid workers a small one? How do green-party politicians justify their hypocrisy--telling us that we should be ashamed of getting on an airplane to travel, while they hop around the globe by plane many times during the year, or telling us that they need to travel around in limousines because their lives may be in danger, while the rest of us are paying through the nose for car tolls (everywhere you turn now here in Oslo) in order to get us to stop driving cars, or paying high prices for collective transportation (you'd think the politicians would be intelligent enough to lower prices for collective transport in order to encourage its use here in Norway, but no). Do they think we're stupid? Because here's a news flash for them--the protests are only just starting. Here in Oslo, a new political party has reared its head; it's called Nei til bompenger (No to Tolls). And I'm voting for them come autumn, because I'm sick and tired of the other political parties that just continue to lie to us. The same with the healthcare system here; is it free? No. It is cheaper than in the USA, and if you need an operation you won't pay an arm and a leg for it like in the USA. But the taxes we pay are what fund the healthcare system. I don't have a problem with this; what I have a problem with is the exorbitant salaries that hospital and healthcare leaders enjoy, also that the bureaucracy of healthcare has grown exponentially. We are paying for administrators to bureaucratize us to death, and the only way to do something about it is to protest and to vote the politicians who support this system out of office.

Greed. It blinds political leaders and company leaders. It encourages them to milk the system. Power blinds them too. God forbid they should have to give it up at some point (think Trump). And that brings me to our illustrious religious leaders who are also blinded by worldly power, the ones who allowed pedophiles to carry on freely in their midst, while the rest of us were trying to live our lives according to the teachings of Christ. Think the Catholic church, that deserves everything it is experiencing now (it should pay out settlements to individuals abused by pedophiles for a long time to come) and more, for sweeping its pedophile problem (a crime) under the rug for decades. How do these religious leaders live with themselves? But they did and they do, because they knew they would not get caught forty or fifty years ago. Their parishioners were loyal, hard-working, law-abiding, and God-fearing. They lived according to their faith and were not the hypocrites that their priests turned out to be. Any priest that defends or protects a pedophile, a wife-abuser, a rapist, or a murderer, is a criminal in my book. They can rot in jail for all I care. They abused their calling, and their parishioners, and God. Perhaps God will show them mercy, I am not interested in doing so.

The garden in late May

It's taking a while this year for the garden to really 'take off'. Daytime temperatures have been mild, around 50-55 degrees F, but at night it's quite chilly, with temperatures around 40-45 degrees. A lot of the plants don't know what to make of it; there has been too much temperature swinging. In late April we had temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees F and a lot of sunny days, and here we are, nearly in June, and we're still struggling with chilly temperatures and mostly cloudy days. That can confuse a garden, especially the vegetables and some of the more sensitive flowers. Some few vegetable plants have died, whereas others (like my green bean plants) have not sprouted yet (I put the seeds right into the soil). Conclusion: seedlings do not like chilly temperatures and therefore do not sprout. So it doesn't help to start plants in the greenhouse if the temperatures drop considerably after the seedlings are transplanted outdoors. Yesterday, I seeded out green bean seeds in the greenhouse again, in the hope that the warmth inside will allow for quick sprouting. We'll see. Otherwise, the perennial flowers have come back, albeit slowly. I planted dahlia tubers for the first time this year, and they are coming up nicely. But as I said, it's slow-going and slow-growing for the garden this season.

I took some photos of the garden this past Sunday; this is my garden in late May.

Allium blooming--the bees love it

Potato plants--Folva type

Strawberry patch starting to flower--one of two patches

view of garden facing Telthusbakken (street)

north view of garden including greenhouse

Heuchera (aka coral bells or alumroot) perennials interspersed with pansies

Quotes about miracles

• Hope... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles. --Samuel Smiles
• God continues to work miracles in my life.--Willie Aames
• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. --Albert Einstein
• Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. --Walt Whitman
• His hands are miracles. I can watch them for hours, transforming wood into something it never dreamed of being. --Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
• It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t. --Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
• Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles. --George Bernard Shaw
• After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. --William Golding
• When you look at all the miracles attributed to Jesus, they're all about change. --Michael Sheen

The first quote has special relevance for me now, especially this week. An unexpected phone call reminded me of the presence of hope inside me when I thought I had none, and that hope sometimes leads to miracles. They may be tiny--but miracle of miracles, any tiny miracle is about change, about a shift in the universe toward love and away from darkness. That is what I believe. 

. 

An incredible amount of pollen this year

Spring this year has been a particularly bad one for hay fever sufferers and those who are allergic generally--not surprising when you can literally see the yellow pollen all around you and feel the gritty layers of pollen that have built up on window sills, tables, and floors. It rained heavily today after a windy night with intermittent rain showers. The rain washed some of the pollen off the surfaces to which it has been clinging. The results--pools of rainwater that are ringed with pollen (see photos), and flowers on my balcony that are sprinkled with pollen due to the wind (see photos). But the rain didn't manage to wash all the pollen away. Once again, nature ensures the survival of the fittest. The tree or flower that has produced this type of pollen is a hardy plant and one that most likely adapts optimally to its surroundings in order to survive.

Garden layout for 2019

Here is the garden layout I designed for the 2019 planting season. There's always a new challenge each year--new flowers and vegetables to plant or a new project waiting in the wings. This year we'll be getting back the 2 meters that was taken from us about one and a half years ago when Oslo's city planners started to do necessary road work on the steep road that parallels the garden. The nice thing is that we'll get back a lot of soil, and that means I have a new area of the garden to plan. So I'll be planting trees: magnolia, lilac, and plum. And planting wild ivy so that it will grow up and along the garden fence to provide privacy. I have English poppies waiting to be planted in that area as well. I'll be posting photos during the summer, but for now, this is the planting plan, and I've already planted most of the seedlings that were in the greenhouse. I'm hoping for a warm and sunny summer.