Good morning Motley Meese! Hope your weekend was lovely. Remember to let your peeps know where you are!

This week’s shot of the week was taken in the butterfly garden at Kiptopke State Park here in Virginia.

Commander Chris Hadfield took this from the ISS and shared it on twitter.  

Here is your Sunday night news.  Please add stories you like, or from where you are, in the comments.

Disclaimer:  In case it is not already abundantly clear, the stuff inside the blockquotes are NOT my words.  I provide links to the full content just above each blockquote.  I give full attribution to photos from news sites and normally copy their own attribution directly.  If I use my own words, they are in plain text, and outside of the blockquoting and orange links.

Looking south from the Shoreline Trail just south of University of Utah section.    

Mom lived to be 93 years young. She died May 16, 2005. We all miss her very much. Happy Mother’s Day.

The majority of countries that celebrate Mother’s Day do so on the second Sunday of May. On this day, it is common for Mothers to be lavished with presents and special attention from their families, friends and loved ones. But it wasn’t always this way. Only recently dubbed “Mother’s Day,” the highly traditional practice of honoring Motherhood is rooted in antiquity, and past rites typically had strong symbolic and spiritual overtones; societies tended to celebrate Goddesses and symbols rather than actual Mothers. The maternal objects of adoration ranged from mythological female deities to the Christian Church itself. The personal, human touch to Mother’s Day is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in the past few centuries did celebrations of Motherhood develop a decidedly human focus.

That human focus for me is shown in this photograph. I am the baby in the picture. Two more younger brothers came in the six years after this photo. Our mother was a tireless worker and loved us all with her whole being. Keeping up with the demands of the farm home, the school work, the church going, discipline, and cooking non-stop must have been exhausting. My brother said we had a wringer clothes washer at the time of this picture. Fortunate for her. I remember always having three long clothes lines in the yard, usually drooping under the weight of our clothes. Apparently, the dryer didn’t come until much much later.

In addition to the duties and pleasures of being our mother, she also kept some diary and journal entries for some occasions. I think she could have done many other kinds of productive things in her life. She chose this course and gave it her entire being. Below is a note transcribed from her writing. It clearly expresses the events of the special day in 1947.

The years jumble in my mind, some years of soul-lifting joy, others of great sorrow, pain, or stress. They look like baseball cards with the year on top instead of the player’s name, a couple of images, a few stats, the cards all tumbled out of their box, out of order. Fifty-one years, 51 cards, all out of order. The stats have smudged and run, lines of text fallen off and out of place. I sort through carefully, delicately moving the text back onto the correct cards, sorting, taking in the images again.

Just like with any box of baseball cards, many of them seem ordinary, others distinguished. Cards from my adulthood, 1980, ’81, ’88, ’92, … Mom appears on some of these cards and then she is gone, 1997 the last.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom, the memories jumbled, the pain and sorrow, some joy. She died in 1997 but she spent many years disappearing, fading from view. I had so little of her, not just now, not just that she died “too soon” at age 65, but even while she was alive. I had so little of her.

  Make sure you let your peeps know where to find you!  

As North Carolina’s Legislature tries to out stupid Texas with bills saying that you can’t observe the rise of sea level and rely on science that only the crony appointed Coastal Management Commission can do that I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature has gone on strike. Now I haven’t run these observations through the science geniuses of the Legislature (snark) but notice the pattern.

With one in six Americans living at risk of hunger, our food banks are stretched thin and providing food assistance to nearly six million people each week. Food donations are crucial to our goal of a hunger-free America. ~ Bob Aiken, President and CEO of Feeding America.

The statistics are staggering. From Feeding America, some facts on food insecurity and very low food security:

•  In 2011, 50.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, 33.5 million adults and 16.7 million children.

•  In 2011, 14.9 percent of households (17.9 million households) were food insecure.

•  In 2011, 5.7 percent of households (6.8 million households) experienced very low food security.

•  In 2011, households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 20.6 percent compared to 12.2percent.

•  In 2011, households that had higher rates of food insecurity than the national average included households with children (20.6 percent), especially households with children headed by single women (36.8 percent) or single men (24.9 percent), Black non-Hispanic households (25.1 percent) and Hispanic households (26.2 percent).

•  In 2011, 8.8 percent of seniors living alone (1 million households) were food insecure.

•  Food insecurity exists in every county in America, ranging from a low of 5 percent in Steele County, ND to a high of 37 percent in Holmes County, MS.v

From the White House – Weekly Address

President Obama discusses the housing market and urges Congress to confirm Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and take action to give every responsible homeowner the chance to refinance and save money on their mortgage.

  Make sure you let your peeps know where to find you!  

For a controversy which has played in so many committee rooms the factual narrative of events in Benghazi seems pretty hard to follow and has been largely subsumed in partisan assumptions. The State Department Accountability Review Board report gives an impressively coherent blow-by-blow of the tragic events at the Special Mission compound; though it fails to mention, by name, the CIA operation it is publicly alleged that the ‘mission’ was largely established to conceal and protect:

The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. […]

The CIA worked from a compound publicly referred to as the “annex,” which was given a State Department office name to disguise its purpose. The agency focused on countering proliferation and terrorist threats, said an American security contractor who has worked closely with CIA, the Pentagon and State. A main concern was the spread of weapons and militant influences throughout the region, including in Mali, Somalia and Syria, this person said.

Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Margaret Coker – CIA Takes Heat for Role in Libya WSJ 1 Nov 12