Friday--

I accidentally hit "publish" last night and then decided that I would give the blog a rest until next year. However, I changed my mind when I saw this at the Adventures and Musings of an Archdruidess. For all those who go batshit crazy over what women wear.

Monday--

Hope you had a good holiday weekend. Ours was pleasant: dinner with brother and his family. We don't do much for any holiday. I will say I haven't been as grumpy this season--perhaps because we don't watch much TV any more so we don't see much of the endless Christmas commercials. In that vein, I would have much more sympathy for Catholicism if all I had to go by was Pope Francis. As it is he is a (sometimes) bright spot in an otherwise bleak religion. For me, anyway. Sorry all you Catholics.

The post-mortems on the election continue and the same on Obama's Presidency are starting. James Kunstler has a good one at Clusterfuck Nation.

Tuesday--

Temps have returned to something near normal for late December--high 20s this morning. That is after a near 50 yesterday. After several days of warm weather, and one of persistent and at times heavy rain, a large part of the snow we received early in the month is gone. My spinach is sprouting upstairs but nothing from the lettuce yet.

Wednesday--

We have seen this trend over the last couple of years with Mom's doctors. Originally she paid the co-pay at the end of her appointment. About two years ago they started collecting when she registered for her appointment. We haven't had any emergency visits lately so what who would collect and when is a question I can't answer.

I have read several articles on this development. We got rather used to seeing disturbances at the malls on Black Friday though this year was surprisingly quiet at that time. Then the post-Christmas chaos came. I can only wonder what in the hell has happened to people?

Thursday--

This is wrong!! And it is why I am glad the larger, multinational versions of such "trade" agreements (TTP and TTIP) failed. I wish the Tanzanian government had told the G8 to take their "development" funds and go elsewhere. The environment loses, the farmers lose. The only winners: Monsanto et. al.

John Michael Greer has his annual assessment of his predictions at the end of last year and his predictions for the coming year. His are among the more realistic prognostications though some might not like how many "we just don't know"s are included. But in fact on so many issues we don't know either the trajectory or the speed of potential changes. As has been said before: buckle up; its going to be a bumpy ride.

Monday--

Well, another Monday and December is nearly 2/3 finished. I am so ready for this year to end but I am not looking forward to the next with anything like hopeful anticipation. At least not on the political/social/economic front. I am always hopeful about the gardens and the little projects I have going. The temperature outside is -12 with a windchill making it feel like -24. Thankfully I don't have to be out in it. We have a thick blanket of snow over everything on the patio except the path to the gate and the garbage tote. The weather people predict a stretch of about 5 days with temperatures at or above freezing so some of it may melt before the next round. However, those forecasts change each day.

Happy story!! Library cat 1/idiot councilman 0.

According to Charles Hugh Smith's questionnaire I am a Deplorable. He notes you don't have to be white to be such. And, since I didn't support the Repthuglican nominee but I do agree with all of the statements with a bit of an amendment on one, I guess you don't have to be one of them either.

Tuesday--

Nothing much I wanted to link to or comment on. I spent a good bit of time winding embroidery thread onto bobbins. That is part of my effort to both clean up the sewing/craft area and find out what is where. I don't know how often I couldn't find something I knew I had and bought another--only to find the original later.

Wednesday--
Happy Solstice and Welcome to (meteorological) winter.

We had a more complicated shopping trip than usual. I needed more bobbins which meant a trip to Michaels. I needed to return a nook cover which I thought would fit but didn't so we needed to stop by Barnes & Noble. And so it went--several small stops culminating in the grocery store. Nothing much else got done.

Thursday--

Tom Englehardt on the possibility the Trump administration will make us wish for 1984.

Friday--

Was quite warm yesterday and we are supposed to have above normal temps for the next ten days. I wonder how much of the snow will melt.

Saturday--

Exhausting day already and it isn't even noon yet. Some time ago we got some put-together shelving to replace some that was getting more than a bit brittle and worn. It turned out the new shelves were too big to put in the place where we intended to put them--where the old shelves were. We didn't even have to unwrap them to see our plan just wouldn't work. So, being just-in-case types, we stored them up in our plant/sewing/catch-all room and completely rearranged that space. Well, I finally was slugged by inspiration and found a way to use the shelves. It involved moving one set of shelves into a space in another room where they fitted perfectly and putting the new shelves in the vacated space instead. Couldn't put the entire five shelf unit in but the last shelf fits nicely under the table and provides more space for things. I have begun to put things in new arrangements but it is going to be a while before everything is in place again. Right now I have done enough for the day.

Sunday--

We got the snow promised and some vicious winds as well. We have no reason to go out so we won't.

I have the rest of the clean up upstairs to finish and will be busy with that for the day.

Tuesday--

This doesn't really help the people arguing for the Dakota Access Pipeline. The electronic monitors didn't detect the leak; the land owner found it.

Wednesday--

I do like a man who loves his job!!! And I love reading about entitled assholes who get taken down a peg or two (or three or four).

When there is nothing to laugh about a good snicker works!!

Then Echidne of the Snakes posted this which one of her commentators called perfect LAWS (laugh and weep simultaneously.)

Thursday--

The lake effect snow hasn't shown up--yet. The weather people predicted it for last night and today so it still has time to develop. The temperatures are really frigid--down into the low single digits. We did all of our grocery and other errands yesterday so we can stay snug inside today and for what they say will be another snowy weekend starting tomorrow.

John Feffer has a new post at Foreign Policy in Focus: From Here To Dystopia. I finished Splinerlands last night. I think it will be worth a second read sometime later next year. The name of his main character, Julian West, kept tickling the back of my mind. I knew I had read another book with a character of the same name but not recently. And I was right. the book was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. However, Bellamy's book, published in 1887 and which I read more than 30 years ago, was a socialist utopian novel in which the state is the benevolent employer and everyone is happily toiling away in a socialist paradise. There was another book that was a direct answer to Bellamy (which I also read but the title of which and author I can't remember). That one ended in a workers' rebellion and anarchy.

Friday--

Nothing much to comment on. The temps broke 20F a bit ago. Only very light flurries so far but more expected tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be messy with temps high enough to give us a mix of rain, freezing rain, and snow.

I started six tubes each of spinach and lettuce under the lights upstairs. We'll see how they do.

Monday--

We had snow and a goodly bit of it over the weekend. We swept off the car and shoveled the patio twice so there isn't much to do this morning. The official count was 4 to 5 inches here but the official numbers are meaningless. What we got on the patio is closer to 8. And it is the patio we have to clear so it is what really matters. Only part of the snow that fell the weekend before had melted so that 8+ inches was on top of what remained. Next weekend they are predicting snow from Friday through Sunday for an additional 5-8 inches. At this rate we won't see bare ground again till April.

I have been busy getting cutting and folding the toilet paper cores into starter pots and getting the small plant tower back into condition. I want to start some lettuce and spinach. I think they might do well inside under the lights. We keep the house at 68 during the cold months and those are plants that like it cool. That will give me an opportunity test the cardboard tubes for starting plants before spring.

Is anyone really surprised by this development? In our wired world everything gets connected and becomes part of the "internet of things." Unless you are like us: dumb phones, dumb fridge, dumb freezer, etc. But I dread replacing any of what we have. How soon before the connectivity becomes "standard?" And on everything?

We have reduced our news (and TV) watching drastically. I have described our growing disenchantment with the media at several point in the last 13 years or so I have been posting on this blog. Someone else has found out exactly what we did: quitting the news makes us feel better, we found other sources of information on things that are important to us, that information usually comes with more depth and more reasoned an nuanced analysis, and is devoid of most of the drama of the "if it bleeds, it leads" style of TV pseudo-journalism. And this is likely to make matters worse.

Well, that is a bit more than normal so I will go ahead and post. See what happens tomorrow.

Saturday--

Some people were upset at Time Magazine's selection of the Bully-elect as their cover-boy "man" of the year. This article has some very interesting conclusions concerning the photograph they chose to use.

Ever since Ben Bernanke quoted bank robber Willie Sutton with reference to Social Security and Medicare in Congressional testimony I have expected something like this. I tried to read the bill itself by it is in many areas incomprehensible. What I did get follows along with Mother Jones's assessment and with past Repthuglican pronouncements. For another good analysis of the bill check out this piece on MSN. I love the description of the proposed "fix"--comparing it to how one "fixes" a cat.

Sunday--

An interesting article: The Golden Arches of Decline. It echoes much of what we have thought here for some time. Our big corporations no longer have any anchor to any place or people. They may have been established in a particular neighborhood and among a particular group of people but they long since cut its ties. They have no obligations to those places and people and the ties of "charity" are either abstract (given to nebulous groups who also don't have bonds to place and people) or don't really address the problems faced by the people and places they have left behind.

Monday--

And a snowy one it is. We did get our first measurable snow yesterday along with an hour-and-a-half blackout.

Ah, someone says exactly what I feel about the recent election!!

Tuesday--

I like that word "Commercialmass." Anyone who has visited this blog in past years at this time know how little I like the commercialization of this (and other holidays).

John Feffer has a post on Englehardt's Tomdispatch site that is a take off on his Splinterlands novel. I am waiting for my copy to come in at my local bookstore.

Wednesday--

Most of the snow we got Sunday has melted. The temperatures rose higher than the weather people expected.

An interesting counterpoint to this story: our local grocery store took out its "self-service" lanes and put back the two regular checkout lanes they removed three or four years ago to make way the cashier-less stations. We rarely used them preferring to chat with the cashiers who rang up our sales. We like that human contact. I don't think a totally cashless store would fly here--certainly not for us. Also we don't use "smart" phones and we like the paper receipts.

Thursday--

And excellent summary by Nomi Prins of how the Bully-elect's administration is shaping up: of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.

Friday--nothing much out there today.

Sunday--

I didn't have anything to say about anything yesterday. So I just read other things. I also cleaned out a number of sites and blogs I am not going to follow any more. My interests change, or the blogger's interests or focuses change, our they (or I) have hit a rut and I need to shake things up a bit on my side. Some bloggers I have followed have become more commercial and I don't want to be bombarded with plugs for products.

This morning I found this interesting item. Facebook a digital graveyard?? Hmmmm! Yeah, I see the point but I think it needs expanding. The entire internet is a digital graveyard. I can't count the number of times I found a blog during a search and thought it might be interesting to follow only to discover that the blogger is no longer active. Whenever the aggregator I use suggests a new site for me I check first when the last post was published. Often I find the writer hasn't posted for a year--2 years--or more. When ever I check out a news story I check the publication date first of all because too often I have found the story isn't really all that new. Someone has just found it and linked to it as though it were. The whole internet is a digital graveyard not just social media.

We had snow flurries this morning but it hasn't accumulated. We have had no significant snow fall and it is the first weekend of December. The temperatures have been up and down but trending downward. The furnace has gone on more often but since we keep the temp inside at 68F it hasn't been working all that frequently. I left the plants in the tower, and the lavender and three mums in their various places. We'll se if they survive the winter. I just spent a bit of time making up some toilet paper roll starting pots which I will plant with lettuce and spinach to see how they will do inside. Be nice to get some greens over winter that are locally grown. I brought the blueberry in when that first cold snap froze the soil in the containers. I don't think it was damaged. Something else we will see about. I gave up on the one sickly rosemary but the two others I started from cuttings are doing well. The will need a new home soon. Getting much too big for their current location. I need to sit down with some drafting paper and map out the garden so I can plan where to put what. The catalogs have started coming in so planning the what is on tap as well.

Monday--

So the Rick Snyder's Attorney General in Michigan is arguing literacy is not a "right."

Perhaps, this is the best expression of Black Friday and the whole damned "holiday" season.

Is blatant narcissism and self-promotion an "ideology?"We are all looking for the "goat entrails" on which we can prognosticate what our Bully-elect will do (or not do). All of the signs and portends are confusing and contradictory. The only constancy he has shown is to himself.

Tuesday--

Andrew Bacevich has another good article at Tomdispatch. We have heard a lot of talk about the "swamp" in Washington which the Bully-elect has pledged to drain (though how he will do that when he has brought in the most rapacious gators to drain the environment that created them. But, as Bacevich points out, there is another swamp feeding into Washington: the swamp of war. They both have to be drained.

The Daily Kos has a post "should we be concerned by signs that democracy itself is in danger?" I have wondered throughout the election season as our Bully-elect claimed that the system was rigged or that fraud was somehow involved, and as stories came out that Russia was hacking the voting systems, or that various actors were implanting fake news to drive the vote which ever way they wanted. This system works only so long as we trust it. When enough of us don't trust it any more it will fail. I wonder how close we are to that situation.

Wednesday--

Since we have so over-used antibiotics that we have increasing numbers of bacterial strains showing not just resistance to a single antibiotic but often multiple antibiotics, scientists are reaching back in time to old remedies.

Thursday--

Welcome to December--almost at the end of a depressing year.

A suggestion for how to handle "toddler" Bully-elect.

Friday--

Infidel753 sums up the dilemma of our present election: minority rule. With Clinton having gained almost 2% more actual votes than the Bully-elect, his supporters are clutching at straws to shore up the legitimacy of his Electoral Collage win. For most of our 200+ years under the Constitution the process has worked fairly well. The Electoral College has differed from the popular vote only four times in the all that time. Unfortunately two of those times occurred since 2000. And, from a map I saw earlier showing county by county results, may reflect a growing divergence between lightly populated interior states and heavily populated states with large cities. Balancing out such interests has always been a problem which is why states are awarded Representatives on the basis of population while all states, regardless of population, have two Senators each. That system came under pressure when more northern states without slavery came into the Union than Southern states with slavery. For years the Senate could block any attempt by Northern interests to outlaw slavery through legislation from the House by defeating it is the Senate. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 kept the balance of power until 1854 by mandating that every free state be admitted with a slave state. I wonder what kind of compromise can paper over the disparity in today's world. We have always had to avoid both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority.