making flour

I never did learn how to make flour -- what is harvested, what ground, what thrown away. Somehow that thought was waiting to greet me when I woke up this morning. Somehow it made me feel that my education was lacking in an important aspect. Making flour. Even after looking it up, I am stung, somehow, by what I don't know. Perhaps advancing age and/or a sense of things slipping away into a nobles-and-surfs domain had something to do with it.

Yesterday was my daughter's 31st birthday. How, for heaven's sake, did that happen? My 'favorite'/only daughter came by and this morning planned to meet with my wife at a casino that opened not long ago in Springfield to the south. A casino -- another way to siphon of money the surfs might otherwise have had. No need to raise "taxes," a word no politician is willing to whisper, even when necessary.

For the last couple of days, the press has been awash in alarums about a journalist (Jamal Khashoggi) who entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and never came back out ... and the story seems to be that his writing had pissed off the Saudi hierarchy, who allegedly killed the man and dismembered his body inside the embassy. Human rights people are alarmed that journalistic criticism is under attack by autocrats (the Saudis in this case) who, as it turns out, have something like $110 billion in arms contracts with, who else, the U.S. Donald Trump has said he will get to the bottom of the case and if the stories are true, the U.S. reaction will be "severe punishment." As a canny aside, Trump mentions that Khashoggi is not an American citizen. I have a hunch that "severe punishment" means that the U.S. will wait a couple of weeks, let the audacity and cruelty wane from the headlines, and then press on with the business at which the U.S. is best. One casualty/$110 billion in arms sales... you do the math... the kind of math that is bolstered by the bailouts and red carpets Saudis have unfurled for, who else, Donald Trump.

A grey and rainy day. I think it may be a good day to make some flour ....