Saturday--

The tomatoes I started last week have all sprouted. Only two varieties for now. The Red Robin is a small patio type I can keep in pots in our--relatively--sunny south window. The Arkansas Traveler is a standard sized plant that tolerates low light levels and supposed to be a good plant to keep in the house. The pepper hasn't come up yet but we keep the temperatures on the cool side so it might be a bit slow even with the heating pad.

The coaster set is done and delivered so I can go back to other projects. I have to figure out what is going on with the new row instructions in the shawl pattern. I can't quite see where it is going yet.

I couldn't resist linking to this post given the current concerns over Zika virus and its possible consequences. I stress the word "possible" because we don't have any firm link and a lot of questions. Just because there has been a spike in birth defects at the same time as a spike in Zika cases doesn't mean the former was caused by the latter. Nor does the mere fact that the genetically modified mosquitos were released months before the spike in birth defects mean that there was a causal link either. It is intriguing though.

Damn good question this. But I think it needs a bit of tweaking. Most of us aren't sleepwalking into anything because our news media isn't really a news media any more and are colluding with our political class which follows the old Robert Heinlein dictum: in a government of the people, by the people--don't tell the people. One has to wonder what gains the powers-that-be hope will accrue from another excursion into Libya.

Tom Englehardt has another good essay that ties into a different aspect of the previous paragraph: how do you define "victory" in a process of which most of us are unconscious? I think we are perilously close to insanity (if not already there) as defined by Einstein (or attributed to him): doing the same things over and over (and over and over and over) expecting a different result.

This Bloomberg article cites two failure of our military procurement process. We have a ship that can't reliably sail in rough seas and a fighter-bomber that doesn't do either job well. And we are paying through the nose for them. If this Salon article is right in describing our military strategy as a hammer looking for a nail (and unfortunately finding some semblance to nails everywhere) then our hammers are defective. There is also the fact that the tool misused for purposes it wasn't designed for fails eventually and often disastrously.