No major tasks planned for the gardens--just some rearranging and clean up. I think I will bring the blueberry inside. After I grind the basil in the dehydrator and check the peach peels for dryness I will cut small amounts of other herbs. I saw several I want to take cuttings for. The ones already started are still doing well. We should have warm temps and sun today but the weather report predicts some unseasonably cool days ahead and a few possible storms. That could, and probably will, change in the next five minutes but it has me wondering if we should expect an early fall and winter. I can see the first signs that leaves are beginning to turn.

Number 45 gave a press conference on infrastructure which quickly devolved into a donnybrook on Charlottesville. The idiot simply doesn't know when to stop talking. And the press, for the most part, doesn't know how to do anything except engineer "gotcha" moments. Which #45 is congenitally incapable of not providing. One thing that was lost in the fracas was this first item on Grist's summary of stories: his executive order, the touting of which was the stated purpose of the presser, which would streamline the process of rubber stamp the approval of infrastructure projects. Question: did he deliberately deflect attention away from his executive order and any discussion of its impact?

An historian (and I can't remember which one) who wrote that the North may have won the Civil War but lost the larger war for the American conscience. Over the next half century the Jim Crow social/political system (American Apartheid) and the share-cropping agricultural system combined with decisions like Plessy v Ferguson re-established a "slave" system without the name. I wonder if we aren't seeing a parallel development in the late 20th-early 21st century. The U.S. and its allies won WWII against the Axis powers including Nazi Germany. But now the grandchildren of that "greatest generation" are marching with swastika flags, chanting Nazi slogans, and demonizing Jews, blacks and others they don't see as part of the "volk." And the Germans aren't surprised.

Amen!! HecateDemeter puts things very nicely. Josh Marshall did also yesterday. Marshall makes a further point by asking just what we are honoring when we choose our heroes. Jefferson is the example he chose but any of the southern founding fathers could have been used. Jefferson, a slave holder, gave us the Declaration of Independence which asserts "all men are created equal." In other words, there is a ledger with a positive side and a negative side and, for most of us, Jefferson's positives outweigh the negatives. What about Robert E. Lee? What is there on the positive side to balance the fact that he was the commanding general of an army in rebellion? It is almost as if the winners allowed the losers to write the history.

I love this piece!!