Monday--

Had a busy weekend. One of our local parks had a spring festival, a small one so we saw everything in less than an hour but it was nice to walk around in the sun and people watch. I got all of the plants, from my own "nursery" upstairs and from the garden shop, planted over the weekend. I still have several spots to put more plants and I don't have as many containers as I used to have. I think I have reached the place where less is definitely more. Our little farm market opens in two weeks and we always have plant sellers there with odd things that might tickle my fancy. Until then I have to get all of the empty pots and other things out of the little greenhouse and put away. And I have to clean up the upstairs plant area which is now nearly empty.

This little opinion piece raises some conflicting notions in my mind. On the one hand people should have a right to privacy. But in the age of the internet where everything hangs around forever, what does "privacy" really mean? Some activities, like "revenge porn" or "swatting," are, in my mind at least, criminal. But how can the perpetrators be traced, how can they be punished, and how can we prevent them from repeating their crimes? On the other hand, countries should not be able to demand search engines scrub their sites of information politicos think are "detrimental" (however that is defined) to the country. So far, certain countries (China and Russia as prime examples) have successfully managed to control the internal flow of information. China has been so successful we see frequent references to the "Great Firewall." I think individuals should have the "right to be forgotten" unless they are public figures. Other than that, no censorship. But then another thought--what makes the scraps on the internet so different from diaries, journals, letters, etc. of the past on which so much history is written?

Tuesday--

Ah--yes!!Kunstler has another entertaining post on the condition our condition is in.

Actually, Trump isn't so different from most of our social/economic/political elites. They don't recognize any inconvenient truth until it bites them in their business asses. Islands in the Pacific can drown in the rising seas but Heaven forbid the same thing happens to his Irish golf course. That we simply can't allow.

I have become increasingly skeptical of our health sickcare industry. I have seen so many commercials for drugs that carry side effects worse than the so-called diseases they treat and my actually cause some of the same symptoms. Or for drugs designed to "help" another drug do its job. Talk about double the profit, that is a sure way to do it. Produce a drug that gives marginal or declining benefits and then design a drug to assist it. But then there is another trend I have noticed that has amped my skepticism meter into the red zone: the hyping of "diseases" that were never diseases before or of "pre" disease conditions that require increasing numbers of people to be treated with some company's drugs. That last trend is well covered in this article in MedPage Today.

We have seen several stories about bomb threats on schools. We had a couple here in Indiana. I wondered what was happening. Did some kids want to get out of a test they hadn't prepared for? Did someone get pissed off at the school or people at the school? Well, evidently some of it can be traced to the despicable, criminal fad of "swatting." I love the internet. I remember what it was like to page through physical books (lots of physical books) searching for information for which I need only a few keystrokes now. That some assholes abuse it to play dangerous pranks pisses me off. I hope they are caught, spend several years in prison, and forbidden to ever touch a computer or smart phone again.