Sunday--

Don't have anything much planned today.  A couple of inside plants to water and some more clean up outside.  The gardens are definitely looking end-of-season shabby.  With the cool nights even the sweet potatoes are beginning to show the colors of fall.  The high winds and savage rain squalls of the last couple of days broke the branches of one of the pepper plants so I took all the peppers off and cut the broken branches.  It is time to take that plant and a couple of the others out.  I saw a couple of blossoms but they won't have time to develop peppers even if the blossoms do set.

Here is a piece for the "more technology isn't always better" file.  Often it is simply more expensive. There is something very sexy about a $1trillion "weapons system" but I think a lot of guys are mistaking one "gun" for another.

Much of this article feels very familiar even though the author concentrates on Australian politics, which has just experienced the fifth Prime Minister in a bit over five years, with only a couple of asides about U.S. and European cases.  To boil down the argument: the structures that governed how the western world worked (socially, economically, and politically) for most of the last century (and particularly since the end of WWII) have broken down and we are in an era when new alignments are being created.  Only the gods of chaos know how it will end up.

I guess this bill will go about as far as the one Rep. Nolan introduced just before the last government shutdown.  Too bad.  It goes to show how unethical our legislators are that the first bill wasn't passed and isn't standard operating procedure.