Still dark. Since the autumnal equinox our daylight has shrunk. Dawn doesn't come til around 7am now. We have also had very cool overnight lately. We added our crochet spreads to the beds and brought out our winter clothes. Still haven't turned on the furnace though some of our neighbors have. The seasons have definitely changed.
I shifted away from the news already. None of the coverage is all that informative. A lot of speculation goes toward the questions of what and how Israel and the U.S. missed the build up to the attack. What I find interesting is none of the sources aren't paying much attention to the low tech nature of the attack; hang gliders for example. How much else went low tech, old school.
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Bright sun right now by the weather channel said we have a frost warning for about 8am. Last night temperatures were in the high 30s. I plan to bundle up and start clearing some of the nearly spent plants and deadheading the mums. The diplodenia are the most sensitive of the plants in the gardens so I expect them to start showing the cold stress soon. I know the valerian, indigo, and asiatic lillies should come back next spring. I hope the hibiscus are hardy enough to do the same. We'll see. I should start looking at the seed companies and figure what I want to order for next year.
Nothing has happened on our national political impasse so there is nothing to comment on--not even sarcastically. And we won't know we won't know what is going to happen in the Israel-Gaza situation until it happens. Nothing looks good there. I did notice something today--actually since last Sunday. I haven't been able to get into the Jerusalem Post site. I get a "bad gateway" message. I found the Facebook page for it which seems to be working although it doesn't have much in the news. I have been able to get on Haaretz. In case you are wondering, I also read Le Monde, NHK, Ekaterina, ANSA, Dutche Welle, and other foreign English language sites. Most are saying pretty much what the U.S. sites are saying.
On to other issues--I found this today although the article was in my e-mail yesterday. We have long been as careful as we can be about what additives are in the foods we buy. Can't avoid all of them but we have reduced the amounts quite a bit.
Going back to the Israel-Gaza conflict, David Kaiser has an interesting post on some history that should raise some concerns. As the quip that is often attributed to Mark Twain goes "history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme." And a stray thought has brought up the title of a book published a few years ago about economic crises: This Time Is Different. The various crises were never really different because people tried the same tactics over and over. And another stray thought: doing the same thing time after time and expecting a different result is the definition of madness. The last attributed to Albert Einstein.
Anne Applebaum has a good article in The Atlantic. She covers the post WWII "rules based order" very well but, again, I have thoughts of another "rules based order" established after the Napoleonic Wars. Some historians referred that period as the Long Nineteenth Century and ended with WWI. Europe suffered few wars on its own territory and those were short and sharp. From around 1880 on the order established after 1815 began to crumble with competition between the European countries and increasing violence from anarchists and revolutionaries. The whole tottering structure exploded with the murder of the Austrian Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia. Everyone thought the war would be short and sharp like the Franco-Prussian War but it turned out to be long, vicious, and destructive like the American Civil War.
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