Good morning to you all. A bit foggy with the possibility of a few more showers this morning before the sun moves in this afternoon. We will be going out to see what is at our city farmer's market a bit later. Our favorite one hasn't opened yet but, if I remember rightly, it opened later toward the first of July. They usually have the first local corn. I saw a couple of plants in the gardens that will need to be moved. They simply aren't happy where they are. But most plants are doing very well.

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As ou can see, I didn't get back to the blog yesterday. It is now Sunday and we now have some cloud cover that moved in after a brief appearance of the sun. We are on the edge of the clouds as usual. It should burn off or move off later today. The entire week is supposed to stay in the 70s. We can handle that. I am getting some of the little gardening chores done a bit at a time. It is too cool to spend much time out there at the moment but the temperature is rising and should move into the 70 in the next couple of hours. I found several little tomatoes on three of the plants. I have pruned and tied up only about one-third of my plants so far. The have grown so much over the last few days. All of the plants have.

We did visit the farmers' market yesterday. It has grown over the years and should get bigger as the season progresses and after the downtown park that will be its final home is finished in August. I was looking for some new plants to replace the roses in the fence holders but I didn't find anything really suitable. I will go back to Home Depot Tuesday.

I have been avoiding most of the broadcast news lately. Yesterday after the second repeat of the asinine coverage of the Weiner 'story' and the idiocy of the spectators at the Casey Anthony trial I put on Syfy even though we had seen everything at least once. My complaints: the constant repetition without any new information, the hyping of rather mundane stories, the uncritical presentation of political opinion, and the spotlighting of sanctimonious political whores who adopt what ever position they think will benefit them at the time.

I agree, Lois. Nature has been and is giving us a beating. How long? If this is a shift from a normal, cyclical warm spell to a normal, cyclical cold spell it can last several hundred years. The last shift came around 1300 and lasted to the early decades of the 1800s. Thanks to a combination of famine (due to crop failures), epidemics (primarily bubonic plague but including other diseases), and warfare (the Hundred Years' War began around 1345 and lasted till 1453) the population of Europe dropped by about 50% in 100 years. If it is something even more catastrophic thanks to the effects of human action--no one knows. I remember an interesting statement from the PBS film 'Black Blizzard' about the Dust Bowl. Agricultural practices introduced in the 1870s which quickly spread across the Great Plains changed the weather patterns over the area deepening the drought. In other words, man's economic activity had a detrimental effect for the weather humans living in the area depended on. Those who claim that puny man cannot affect something like weather, or climate, or the atmosphere, or the oceans because they are simply too big simply have a selective acquaintance with history.

Chris Martensen has an interesting essay this morning. The first item that attracted my attention was his description of our modern economy as requiring infinitely expanding credit. Nothing can expand infinitely except in pure mathematics. The physical world has limits. The second item I found fascinating was his graph of the growth of the U.S. credit market since 1970. It has doubled 5 times in 40 years. The pattern is a nice parabola that mirrors the ideal exponential curve. As I looked at it I was reminded of the problem of trying to accelerate past the speed of light. As you get closer to that limit the energy you put into the effort produces less and less result. I would guess, as Martensen concludes, that all of the efforts made to increase the amount of cash available to lend has bumped up against the same phenomenon--no matter how much we put in the result will be disappointingly small. And something else comes to mind: if business and industry has no real expectation of resumed growth on the scale of the recent past, will they have any real interest in increasing payrolls? I think not. And all of the talk of reduced regulation and reduced taxes is just that--talk. I am quite sure that all of the industries and businesses lobbying for those 'reforms' are quite honest on one level: such measures would improve their bottom lines. But their promises of new jobs is nothing more than self-serving hot air.