Tuesday--

I guess Memorial Day weekend is a good time to get an attack of the "lazies." I did a lot of reading, on line and otherwise, but simply didn't want to spend the energy to blog--so I didn't. I tended the gardens which are doing quite well. Beans, cucumbers and peas are coming up very nicely. All of the strawberries but one are doing well also. We expect rain off and on this week so my watering will be somewhere in between the showers, if we get any. The farm market opens on Saturday and will run on Tuesdays and Saturdays through mid-October. We are looking forward to it.

We aren't big on holidays here. We hate the commercialism and hype associated with most of them and the rest simply don't reflect much of our lives any more. Memorial Day and Veterans' Day are good examples. It is good to reflect on the lives expended in our wars and honor those who have served but we should also take a long, hard look at what those wars accomplished. To my mind no war our country has fought in my lifetime (born in 1949) was worth the cost in money, materiel or lives.

Britain has a referendum coming soon (June 23) on whether to remain in the EU. Right now the polls are all over the place depending on the political orientation of the organization taking the poll. Articles like this one are popping up all over the place. One of the main talking points for the pro-EU forces is the economic hit England would take if the left. This says that the economic benefit derived from the Union isn't so great and the hit might not be so bad after all. Notice at the end how the immigration issue comes in.

On our elections take a look at this article which reflects much of our rather bleak thoughts here. I wish we had a really honest choice. We could if "None of the above" were one of the options. But it isn't so we have the lovely "choice" of death by poison or death by hanging (or by any of a myriad other means) which is no choice at all--it is all death. For another take on the situation read James Kunstler's latest Clusterfuck Nation post. He is on a good roll.

And then Ugo Bardi makes an interesting comparison: his father in the early stages of Alzheimer's vs. Donald Trump's debating style vs. our civilization's inability to come to a coherent strategy to deal with our problems. He notes Ronald Regan and I remember hearing the news that he had Alzheimer's and asking how they could tell.