Saturday--

I got a full dehydrator of peppermint yesterday and I only harvested on one pot.  I have the plants in my small tower to cut.  I watered everything a second time late in the afternoon.  Hope the dragon's egg cucumber recovers.  It tried out so quickly the day before I almost lost it and the squash.  Our weather people are predicting possible thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow but I'm not relying on that possibility.  All too often what looked like heavy rain did nothing for my gardens.  Besides harvesting from the rest of the peppermints I plan to cook up a small batch of tomato sauce.  Our plants are just getting into full production mode and we can't eat the tomatoes fast enough.

Several broad areas of this country are experiencing a heat wave but how would you handle this kind of heat?

Haven't heard it much over the last 20 years or so but there is a standard question in intro economics: Guns or Butter?  The theory is that you have to somehow balance defense and sustenance.  You can have a strong defense but it will eventually fail if the non-defense economy isn't strong enough to sustain the military and the people.  You can't eat guns and there is only so much you can loot even if you have the guns to intimidate people.  Well, in our current political atmosphere the question is no longer "guns or butter?"  It is "which butter do you cut?" because the guns will be funded at ever increasing levels.

I guess corruption, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  It also depends on how much hypocrisy you can stomach.

What I have thought of most in the "pro-life" movement from the beginning.  They aren't pro-life they are pro-birth.  They don't give a good-god-damn about what happens after the child is born.  The only protection they offer is between conception and birth; otherwise, f##k off.

I said yesterday that we are no longer citizens but income streams for governments.  Well, I should have left it as simply income streams because the privatization of government "services" has made us the income streams of private companies contracted to provide those formerly public services.  Here is one of the results, which totally did not make any impact on our news.

I have bitched for years about the commercialization of our holidays.  The pervasive marketing involving Christmas, Halloween, New Year, 4th of July and almost all other holidays is one reason I don't celebrate them any more beyond going to visit a relative, if asked (and many of them aren't celebrating the holidays as they used.)  I have watched as iconic landmarks changed their names to reflect corporate interests.  The old Sears Tower became the Willis Tower and, I think, has changed yet again.  Comiskey Park was renamed when U.S. Cellular bought the naming rights.  I wonder how long it will be before some corporate giant buys the right to rename Yellowstone or other national park?

I took all the stories about how we should spend so much more time on our feet and all the stories about the treadmill desks with a huge ton of salt (to heck with the grain--it isn't big enough).  I don't take any medical advice on so-called face value.  Evidently I am not wrong to be a confirmed skeptic.