Good wet Thursday, Everyone.  Everything in the gardens survived pretty well--a bit bedraggled but intact.  I am glad I took all of the planters off the fence.  The weather people say reports of a possible tornado a little east of us is being investigated.  The damage may have been caused by the very strong straight line winds that came through.  We got about one and a third inches of rain last night.  At one point I saw a river in our street.  Thankfully we have very good storm drains here.

I have seen a number of articles over the last little while which loudly proclaim a "retirement crisis."  Usually they bash, to one extent or another, the baby boom generation.  Our benefits are too generous or people who don't really need Social Security are getting it (never mind we have paid our share and more into the funds) or we simply are too expensive to maintain.  Private companies over the last two decades have scuttled the pension plans their workers had counted on by converting them to 401k or other such plans or by dumping them onto the federal government.  Public pensions all over the country have been underfunded or funded by borrowing for the last two or three decades.  Unfortunately, I figure that a legal move is afoot that will defraud employees (public and private) of the deferred wages they thought was going to fund a comfortable retirement.  For a while now I have thought the we need to rethink the notion of retirement.  Evidently, Dennis Miller also thinks the same.

Supposedly the wide surveillance programs of the NSA have "prevented" "dozens" of terror plots.  Of course, because everything is top secret, they don't provide any proof.  We should just trust them that this is true.  Sorry, but my fund of trust has been seriously depleted.  Been lied to far too often.  As St. Ronnie once said "Trust, but verify."

Well, the Supreme Court finally made a common sense ruling on genetic patents.  Human genes, at least, cannot be patented.  Now if they would just bring common sense to bear on GMO patents and limit them.  It makes no sense to allow Monsanto, et al., to pollute the gene pool in perpetuity.