Hello, all. Welcome to the last week of October. Another sunny day in a continuing cool but sunny streak of days. I think the forecasters are still predicting rain for later in the week. But the western storm system is supposed to dip south to join a wet system drenching the southeast. Oh well, just caught the latest updated forecast and the rain has been removed. It doesn't matter because I am contemplating simply taking out what is still struggling along in the pots. I still want to take out three or four more containers but haven't got up the energy to empty them.

Bill Astore writes a good piece on his BRACING VEIWS site and I can give a whole heartedly AMEN! to it. However, I don't expect any of the politicians in power now to do what politicians for the last hundred years failed to do. 

I just saw a report on the news this morning that Milei has won his re-election in Argentina. I guess Trump's $20billion "investment" has achieved the first part of his agenda. The banks that coughed up another $20billion are breathing a sigh of relief along with the hedge fund billionaires who had already invested heavily in the Argentine economy. That doesn't mean Argentina and Milei are out of the deep water--they just got a leaky life raft. The economy is still deep in the crap.

Rachel Biticofer provides a history lesson showing where we came from and where we might be going. Do we really want to go there?

We hear people say often that "those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it." Usually that is coupled with a recommendation that we are taught history. Over the last 40 years I have come to reconsider that notion. I don't think people really remember anything of the past unless they have themselves experienced it. Biticofer mentions the Franklin Roosevelt "revolution" which was a response to the Depression. Historians I have read often say that his administration saved American Capitalism from socialism. Socialism and Fascism were very strong movements during the late 1920s and the 1930s. But the memory of the Depression is fading and has been for some time. My mother is 94 and she barely remembers that time because she was born in 1931. Most of her early memories are of the 1940s. And the cultural memory is largely reduced to what is written and not what was viscerally felt. The Second World War is similarly remembered largely by what is written about it as those who actually experienced it fades from living memory. Vietnam is now 50 years in the rear view mirror. A generation has grown up since Sept 9, 2001. What is really sad is that those who want us to go back to what they think of as a halcyon era have no more real, visceral memory of that time that those of us who don't want to go back.

Ugo Bardi wrote an account of what might seem to be a remote episode (or rather episodes) of collapse in the Chincha Islands off Peru. The Chincha people disappeared when their population declined by about 99% as a result of diseases and political chaos that came with the Spanish conquest. The islands became a profitable source of guano (bird shit) for a world wide expansion of agriculture in the 1840s. The industry grew exponentially until just before 1880 when it crashed. Another growth of the industry came in the 1920s but was shorter and never reached the earlier level of production before collapsing about 1960. The Peruvian government tried to rebuild the bird population and were moderately successful but eventually populations precipitously to only 500k. Bardi provides a number of factors involved in all of the collapses but the most basic cause throughout was the overexploitation of a limited resource which couldn't be rebuilt in a timely manner--after all birds can only provide so much shit.