Monday, July 8, 2013

Good Monday. Gardening.

Well, it is Monday.  We expect rain to come in.  In fact the sun has gone and the clouds are coming in now.  How much--who knows?  Right now the weather people say a lot of the system is dissipating as it comes east.  How much gardening I get done depends on when it comes and how much we get.  Sometime soon I do need to take some pictures.  The cypress vine is blooming.  It is rather pretty.  So is the cucumber.  The buds on the hibiscus are swelling so I hope to see blossoms soon.

It is now very apparent that our Constitution is mere toilet paper.  And any law derived from it is worthless.

Status-ization--I love the term.  In answer to his last question: No, we haven't got out of steerage.  They have just changed the name to "Economy."  Another bit of linguistic legerdemain.

Krugman is especially pessimistic today.  Especially note his last sentence.

This story leaves me a bit ambivalent.  I have absolutely no sympathy with the big banks.  I think several of them should have been liquidated not resuscitated with bailouts.  But I haven't had a wonderful experience with credit unions.  I moved to this area several months after I turned 50 and found a local bank that offered a free checking program for depositors over age 50--free checking with interest and without any minimum balances or other such restrictions.  My checking account is still free with interest and no minimum balance.  For a very bnrief time I had also an account with a credit union primarily because I worked for that credit union and the only way I could get automatic deposit was to have an account with them.  When that job ended however suddenly the restrictions kicked in.  Any balance below $500 a certain level was subject to maintenance fees.  The balance quickly declined to below that level because I never did find another job ("retired" on social security eventually) and rather than see it all eaten up by fees I closed the account.  But I stayed with the original bank which never charged a fee no matter how little I had in the account or how inactive the account (it is hard to be active when you have nothing coming in.)  I am firmly in the "if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, bet on it being a duck" camp.  If the credit union acts like a bank, tax it like a bank.

Oh, goody!!!  Another chemical we have to look out for.  I wasn't surprised that the cosmetics industry loves this shit.  I was surprised at the incidence of allergic reactions to it going from 0 to 10% of cases of certain skin conditions within the last years.

The rain has come in and we have had a couple of waves of precipitation.  I won't have to water but I can't do any gardening either.

A couple of days ago Mom read an article about forced sterilizations in several southern states after WWII mostly of young, black women.  She was surprised at how many states engaged in that practice and so soon after the revelations of the extremes of Nazi eugenics.  Well, I found this story about unauthorized and illegal sterilizations in California--from the 1990s through 2010.

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