Good morning to you all on this Memorial Day weekend Saturday.  The weather people extended the 90 degree weather through today with probably showers and thunderstorms for the afternoon.  I watered everything and checked all the plants but will postpone the more extensive work till tomorrow.   So lets see what irritates or intrigues me today.

Oh my, how things have changed.   Raucous and abusive town hall meetings were find when it tea party/Repthuglicans challenging Damnocrats over the Obama health care reform legislation.  Now the shoe is on the other foot and they are Repthuglicans are finding the fit a bit tight.  I see two problems here.  First is the current climate in media and politics which fosters abusive confrontation over intelligent conversation and denigration of those holding opposing opinions.  Second,  this is one lazy crop of politicians who really don't want to engage in a conversation where they have to lucidly and coherently explain their positions.  Instead they want to spew out the tired old verbal sewage as though it was God's word received from on high.  No thought required; not even complete, dramatically correct sentences.

I hear you, Kay.  I wouldn't mind joining you and I am not too worried about bears.  Unless their habitat is so degraded that they aren't finding enough food--which might be the case.  I have often fantasized about finding a nice cabin in the woods and retiring there with a large stock of seeds and some hand tools.   Given the insanity in our allegedly civilized world, it isn't such an 'out in left field' fantasy.

You have been reading my mind, Lois.  See above.

Here is an article you might like.  I don't always agree with Natural News but a lot of what appears there is right on the money.  Daniel Boorstin wrote a little book several years ago that I have but have never been able to get very far into.  I keep my copy of The Image because the few first pages introduce a concept that is very relevant for our culture over the last 30 or more years: the manufacture of 'faux news' and misleading images.  In other words--counterfeiting.

Don't you just love how the news media has to mine even bad news for something positive.  This morning the anchors cited the very nasty jobs report--no net jobs created last month and significant   downward revisions for June and July--ending with the good news that, since January, the economy had created  200k new manufacturing jobs and another couple hundred thousand  health care jobs.  That sounds great except for one thing--we need just about that number of jobs each month to just keep up with the new people first entering the job market.  Reminds me of another book that has a good bit of relevance now-a-days: Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided.  She was talking about the prevalence in this culture of insisting on maintaining a nauseating apply attitude no matter how unpleasant our situation might be.  Oh, Irene just washed away your home with a lifetime's accumulation of goods--be happy; it was just things and you're alive.  Smile.  Frankly, I get very tired of all that insistence on looking at the so-called bright side.  Sometimes we really do need to acknowledge the bad before we move on.