Monday.

Tom Englehardt always writes interesting posts.  An age of impunity, indeed--for some but not for all.  If ordinary folk did what corporations and our government have done they would be in prison.  Looks like the quaint old notion of "rule of law" is dead.

Tuesday.

We had a monsoon type downpour for about fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon.  The rain was so heavy and wind driven we could hardly see the roof tops across the street.  At least we didn't get the hail that Russian beach got.  But the temperatures are supposed to be abnormally low for the next couple days.  Nothing in the gardens was damaged.  I got a nice handful of strawberries earlier but otherwise was lazy about gardening--except for drowning a few Japanese beetles.

Wednesday.

Rain last night and partly cloudy skies right now.  Temperatures are in the mid 50s and probably won't get out of the 60s today.  Almost have to check the calendar to make sure it still is July.  This feels like October.

Thursday.

Another author I love to read: Gene Logsdon, the Contrary Farmer.  Always entertaining.  And applicable on more levels than horticulture.  Most of society seems to be paranoid on some subject and too often the paranoia is based on incomplete or misunderstood information.  Do we over here really understand what is going on with Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the countries from which those children on our Southern border are coming from?  Are we getting complete information and, given our cultural biases, would we understand it if we had it?

Well, the German might respond to the spying kerfuffle by going old school--very old school.  But as Mom commented "They had better think about the ribbons."  Going to (manual) typewriters would make long distance spying a bit difficult.

And another piece from Undernews.  The last comment that the western drought is probably the worst we will see in our lifetimes brought to my mind a recent piece that focused on paleoclimate studies which indicate that the conditions out there, until recently and with a couple of short duration exceptions, were much wetter than was "normal."  It brought a comment from a reader that the author may be right but that his observation won't help the millions of people impacted.  Unfortunately, the reader didn't make the reasonable observation: maybe those people should be seriously considering moving to a more hospitable area.  Only two things made many of those areas tolerable: tapping water either from deep underground or geographically distant areas and the power to run airconditioning.  Lose either and life gets orders of magnitude more difficult.