Well it is a bit warmer this morning and we expect temps in the 40s today. We noticed the weather predictions have changed and taken out a couple of the warm days to give us colder ones instead. The snow is rapidly melting--about half gone now with big bare spots on the lawns.

Well, our very expensive Washington kindergarten is continuing to play the 'He did it, Mommy, not me!!" game. And I see another administration promise has been thrown on the garbage heap. All the national parks and monuments they promised would remain open....are closed.

Got to wondering about all these continuing resolution in lieu of real budgets and did a quick google search. We have only had six years, four under Bush II and 2 under Obama when we had actual budgets, not CRs, passed. That is damned pathetic.

Peter Turchin often has good insights into our political/economic/social situation. In this post he charts the "intraelite" fragmentation he thinks is driving the dysfunctional government. He says the last period of least polarization among our elites ended about 1980 and before that was the period of the Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s. The implications, if you have any feeling for history, are not good. He writes that he wouldn't be surprised if we aren't entering a period of permanent government shutdown. Given my observation on continuing resolutions above, I can't argue with him.

This article goes in the "Well, Duuuh!" file. I have a major gripe with a bit of the introductory paragraph: being less educated doesn't mean being less smart. Mom got a diet hand out from a previous doctor several years ago which made us laugh so hard we almost cried. First problem--the cost of the constituents. Second problem--the waste. One meal listed "half of an avocado" which is expensive but what about the other half? There was no other meal in the week that called for using the other half. Third problem--sheer boredom. That was the most boring menu I have ever seen. Fourth problem--it simply didn't fit our life. We eat two meals a day with a snack if we are so inclined. The died called for four to six small meals each day. I agree with one of the conclusions: any doctor prescribing any diet for any patient should consider how it would work with the patients schedule and budget.

We have complained for sometime about the valorization of college as a route for young people into a career. For year (decades?) now we have read about people who aren't working in the fields for which they went to college and their degrees weren't in the fine arts or humanities either. Every May and June the local TV news programs trumpet the schools where every student was accepted to college or the exceptionally bright students who were offered gobs of money in financial aid from the schools that accepted them. Patrice Lewis has a post which indicates this might be changing. I hope so. I don't denigrate college or university education for those who truly want it but, like so much else in this society, we and the prospective students are being sold a pig in a poke by hucksters who are only interested in the money they can rake in.