Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Sunday.

One of the two pots of albino bullnose peppers have popped.  Now only the corno di toro rosso remains to sprout.  I see several plants I should put into larger pots.  If only the weather would catch up to my plants and turn warmer.  I still have snow on some of my containers and areas of the patio.  I do so want it gone.
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Monday.

There must be something in the air.  Crimea isn't the only secession-bent area.  Check out this one.  Robert Reich calls the phenomenon a "reversion to tribalism."  Interesting thought.

Some very many years ago I read an autobiography by Martha Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona, in which she described traveling up the Colorado River by steamboat to an army fort.  The fort where she disembarked to continue her journey to the outpost her husband had been assigned was about two hundred miles from the mouth of the river.  I thought of that book as I read this piece.  For most of the past century the Colorado never got near the sea.
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Tuesday.

As I said yesterday--secession seems to be in the air.  As the old saying goes: be careful what you wish for.  There is a lot about our country today I don't like but I am pretty sure I wouldn't like living in Russia.

Ah!! Someone else is asking a question I have been asking for a long time now:  who are the "People?"  One of the blogs I read a couple of weeks ago showed a map of the election results of the last Ukrainian election.  The western third of the country went 70-30 for Yulia Tymoshenko.  The eastern third 70-30 for Viktor Yanukovych.  The middle third of the country was split about evenly between the two.  Because the eastern (more Russian) section is the more populous, Yanukovych won a slender majority.  The events since the election shows what might happen when politicians play solely to their base supporters.  Yanukovych played to his when he sharply pivoted away from an economic agreement with the EU and courted Russia.  He totally alienated the EU oriented west of Ukraine which led to the civil/political disorder that led to his exile in Russia.  But his successors immediately scrapped a longstanding political arrangement allowed considerable autonomy in the Crimea and recognized Russian as a co-equal language for Ukraine.  That heavy-handedness resulted in the referendum in which an overwhelming majority of the Crimean "people" voted to secede and join Russia.  In each case, politicians (legitimately) claimed that the "People" had spoken.  And please don't think such can't happen here.  Consider how polarized our social/political culture is now.

It's a small world after all.

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