Howdy, All.  We did get some sun yesterday and very welcome it was.  I am always amazed at how much my moods improve when we have sun no matter what the temperature.  But today is wet though warm.  Forties today with possible 50 tomorrow--before the more seasonable temperatures return for a couple of days.  The weather people say that this has been one of the 20 least wet Decembers on record and one of the 20 warmest.

Another of my wish books (a.k.a., seed catalogs) came yesterday and I started with my garden lists--what I might like to plant.  The next round will begin to rearrange that list taking into account the space I have and what we can actually use.  So far I have 4 varieties of tomatoes (6 plants between them), two new varieties of sweet pepper (a drastic reduction from previous years so we can use up the stock we have in the freezer), eleven herbs (including four new ones).  I am still contemplating a really pretty sweet corn, an heirloom variety of potato, and an heirloom sweet potato.  I told mom I am going to have to rearrange my seeds into three groups now--those I will never plant again in the foreseeable future, those I am not planting this year but like well enough to use again, and those I am planting this season.  I need to find a new home for the never plant again group.

This is the first post by Gonzalo Lira I have read and I am debating whether to follow him or not.  He makes a lot of sense on the implications of the MF Global bankruptcy.  I think he is absolutely right on the money when he says that the regulators and the rest of the Federal government have conflated those so-called 'systemically important financial institutions' till they are the financial system not a part of it.  Talk about the tail wagging the dog!!  And the handling of the MF Global fiasco is simply another example of the bias of our powers-that-be toward the big banks and financial institutions and against the ordinary citizen.  Most of us are simply the sacrificial lambs on the financial industry's altar.

For those of you following the Maya Calendar debate I thought you might like this cartoon found on Phil's Favorites.  It is a financial blog but has some interesting insights if you are into economics.

Evidently the notion proposed by Lira above (a run on financial institutions) isn't all that far fetched.  MSNBC posted the results of a poll that asked what disaster the respondents were most concerned about.  Sixty-three percent said economic collapse.  The author noted that the pollster didn't specify or differentiate between global or nations but that, it seems to me, is a distinction without a difference.  If the global economy goes down the drain we will go with it.

Mark Bittman has a good NY Times Opinionator piece on the failure of the FDA to produce standards that limit the use of antibiotics in farm animals.  One would think that would be a no-brainer in an era of increasing incidence of multiple-drug resistant bacterial infections but not when it interferes with corporate profits. Another case of the big companies privatizing profits and socializing the costs.  After all they don't have to pay the medical bills or funeral costs of those of their customers who get sick from eating the tainted product.

And this might be one reason why people responding to that poll cited economic disaster as something they most feared.