Last day of August--oh my!! It seems like I just planted my gardens and already I have been  the tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, beans, and cucumbers. I think I said on an earlier post that this weather feels more like the end of September than the end of August. Many of my herbs are flowering and the bees are enjoying that. The cuttings I took some while ago are doing well and several are showing roots. I put them in those little amber pill bottles filled with vermiculite a process I will continue since it has worked so nicely. I am slowly deciding which plants I want to take cuttings from to, hopefully, use in the gardens next year.

Found this on Crooks&Liars which sums up #45's visit to Texas. It was, purely and simply, a selling opportunity. And a failed chance for him to show he was something other than a self-centered psychopath/sociopath.

And right on Harvey's heels comes Irma. It became a tropical storm and earned its name earlier today and is expected to become a hurricane tomorrow. Irma is the 9th named storm of the season which is a milestone the meteorologists say isn't normally reached till the end of September.

This is supposed to be in a science text book???

Echidne of the Snakes has taken note of #45's cancelling of the Obama rule that firms with more than 100 employees have to keep records of pay by race, gender and ethnicity. They don't believe it proves or disproves discrimination but, as she noted, absent even that information such discrimination can't be proven at all. That is precisely the point: if you don't like believe what data might indicate, make sure the data isn't collected at all. And she is also right on concerning the Repthuglican definition of "burdensome." And how selectively it is applied.

Friends on Facebook linked to this statement from the American Historical Association concerning the debate over "Confederate" monuments. I put the word in quotes because I have often been unsure exactly what the monuments commemorated given they were erected well after the end of Reconstruction and even longer after the Civil War. The other side is often perplexing as well. Not too long ago a furor erupting on Princeton's campus with demonstrators demanding Woodrow Wilson's name be removed from one of the buildings because of his segregationist legacy. But he was a President of the United States, a governor of New Jersey, a president of Princeton University and a respected academic. Perhaps it would be far more instructive for the present if his segregationist legacy were as well known as the accomplishments we honor. Perhaps we should learn something of the times during which the contested monuments were erected, what the people at the time were actually honoring by honoring defeated rebels, and what people today are actually saying on each side of the argument.