Thursday--

Everything here is pretty much shut down here. The weather people say we had about 12-15 inches of snow which is still falling in some areas. We are in hibernation mode and won't even try to move that snow off the car and patio today. It is finally light enough to see outside and it is incredible. The snow was heavy and wet. The fence is plastered with snow and all we can see of cars is mounds of snow. The wind is still gusting but the snow is so wet and heavy it isn't blowing around. The news reports power outages including one that has stopped the train traffic between points here in Northern Indiana and Chicago. Our power flickered a couple of times yesterday but didn't have any long outages. I haven't heard any plows yet this morning so I guess the plows are working on the major roads. Local government and schools are totally shut down.

On a more positive note--the Moldavian balm I started over the last weekend has sprouted. Hope the other herbs do as well. I found that the little popsicle stick tags I set in the pots work well except that the pencil markings faded as the sticks absorbed water. I was able to decipher the markings and re-wrote the names with a sharpie. Sometime over the next few days I will start the tomatoes and peppers for the gardens and the sunflowers. I will use the sunflowers as "stakes" for the beans and snow peas as I did last year.

William S. Lind has an interesting post on The American Conservative. His main thesis holds ,in American politics, the divide isn't Republican vs. Democrat, or Conservative vs. Liberal but establishment vs. anti-establishment and, in that kind of environment, serial failure (which has marked our military adventures and our social policy) doesn't matter. Take a look. He has a good argument, although I think he could have found a better exemplar of a politician's failure to adhere to the establishment line than Gary Hart whose fall from grace was as much a personal failing as crossing vested interested.

Matt Taibbi wrote a blackly amusing piece in Rolling Stone.  He is right. Trump isn't a run-of-mill con man; he is much above average and he is eating the establish Republicans' lunches.

On the theme or serial failure consider Tom Englehardt's post today: "War, what's it good for? Absolutely nothing". Actually it has accomplished quite a bit but none of the publicly stated goals. Instead it has made sure that "red" Repthuglican states economies stayed marginally afloat, made sure that Repthuglican defense contractors stayed solvent, and made sure our government could plead poverty when it came to spending on infrastructure and social problems. I wonder how long before it notches another accomplishment: the bankruptcy of the U.S?. We are almost there.

I think there must be something in the air for the last little while. Three authors today have similar takes on the current political situation: that what we are witnessing isn't so much a struggle between the Republicans and Democrats (or conservatives and liberals) but between the Demopublican (to steal a term from James Kunstler--I think) establishment and the anti-establishment. The third is Archdruid John Michael Greer who is always right on the money and so very wide ranging in his arguments. He isn't making any prediction that the "Rise and Fall of Hillary Clinton" will keep her out of the White House, though a head to head contest with Trump might, but that the establishment she represents is on the decline even if she wins the election.