Sunday--

My tomatoes are doing nicely but the peppers haven's sprouted yet. One thing one learns from gardening is patience. And giving plants the time and conditions to do their own thing their own way. I planted three varieties of lettuce this morning: Grandpa Admires's, Butterflay, and Verdil. All are heirlooms and supposed to be slow to bolt. These will stay inside and I will plant a new batch for the fall garden.

I wonder how much the final costs for the Rio Olympics will be. And how much (or how little) Brazil will recoup on the project. How much is national self-promotion worth? That is what the Olympics has become. When is psychic masturbation on a national scale not worth the price?

I read something related to this yesterday. And that article indicated that the World Bank was also involved and other possible recipients of the financial institutions' "help" were Venezuela and Columbia as well as Azerbaijan and Brazil. Here is the Express article on the issue. I had two thoughts on this. First, we have gone from bailing out banks and other financial "too big to fail" operations (and putting in place "bail-in" practices which will plunder depositors while protecting share/bond holders and national treasuries) to bailing out countries. Second, where will the funs come from and will the conditions demanded by the IMF and World Bank as the "price" of their "aid" create four more economic zombies like Greece?

Michael Moore on Flint. This is what happens when government is run like a business. The costs of poisoning a city whose residents are mostly black and poor is merely a "cost of doing business." Unfortunately, while businesses pay fines that amount to only a fraction of their bloated profits, governments pay the costs out of the taxes that didn't go to prevent the problem.