Every now and then Fr. Dwight Longenecker has an interesting column. This one precipitated quite a discussion here at our house. He brings in the statistics on the rising suicide rate among white, middle aged or elderly men and tries to connect it to the Las Vegas mass murder. I could also bring in the rising drug overdose rate and opioid addiction rates that show an overlap in the category of white, middle aged or elderly men. A basic question: if this reaction is from a creeping and growing despair, what is driving the despair and is that a problem we have the resources and will to solve? And then I wonder why aren't more white, middle aged or elderly men succumbing to opiates, or to suicide or committing mass murder in this, admittedly, depressing society?

Time Magazine has a slightly different take which is also interesting and not necessarily at odds with the Longenecker piece.

Did get some gardening done. Basically cleaning out a couple of my 5-gal. buckets. I harvested spearmint before clearing those buckets. That is now drying. Got one of the peppermint buckets cleaned out also. Those three containers wore me out so I will wait until tomorrow when, I hope, I will harvest the last of the chocolate mint and clean it up as well--along with the other peppermint and the lemon balm. I will leave the lavender to last because the bees are having a grand time buzzing around that pot.

So Black Friday is becoming a ghost of its former self. Good thing I would say. I never participated in the commercial/consumerist frenzy but I do have relatives who used to plan their Black Fridays as though they were generals going to war. Now if we could only see a similar decline in other commercial "holidays."

I have a lot of reservations (if not downright antipathy) about industrial food production. Just this morning I read of a large recall of ground turkey products because of possible contamination with metal fragments. Sorry I didn't note the site. It is sad in a way that, to me anyway, that I now think of a recall of 300,000+ pounds of ground meat as simply "large" and not huge. This little piece from the Guardian is titled "Goodbye--and Good Riddance--to Livestock Farming". I don't think any more of this author's stance than I do industrial farming or food production. The industrial system reduces all "inputs," whether animate or inanimate, to mere numbers on a balance sheet. The abuse he mentions is embedded in the system. My grandparents had a small, mixed crop farm for most of my childhood and adolescence. I can assure you that their animals were well cared for with numbers limited to what well rotated pastures would support. I once owned horses and, with others, had the great misfortune of renting land from an absentee farmer who over grazed the land horribly. He made it difficult for us to maintain our horses in healthy condition but we did manage it. I read blogs written by small farmers and homesteaders who write about their animals and all of them pay close attention to maintaining a number of animals their land can support and making sure the pastures are not overgrazed. The pollution problems he mentions come from overgrazing and/or from feedlot operations both of which are encouraged by the industrial agriculture system. And switching to faux meat soy products won't solve problems. Soy is grown in monocultures with generous applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (which adds to pollution) and which require plowing and cultivation which result in the loss of a lot of topsoil each year. And since he notes that he can't tell the difference between "quorn" based minced or faux chicken, I will note that I really don't want to eat a macerated vegetable product treated with chemicals to create the texture of meat and flavored with what ever chemicals will simulate the taste. I don't know if I would be able to tell the difference but--and this is key--I don't care if I couldn't tell the difference. I don't want the chemically adulterated imitation "foods" the industry produces and am busily getting rid of them in my life.

I thought it was interesting that #45 said, while in Puerto Rico, that the Puerto Rican debt would have to be cancelled but I take everything interesting or sensible he says with a big dose of salt--enough to endanger my blood pressure. All too often those sensible mumblings are refuted soon after and that appears to be the case here.

Politico has a good summary of the U.S. response to hurricane damaged destroyed Puerto Rico. I think the story confirms my own summation. We responded differently to Puerto Rico because it was "too poor and too dark (as in brown)." Our government responded more effectively to Texas and Florida because the residents were wealthier and more white. And five years from now both areas will be whiter and the wealthier areas will be largely rebuilt while the darker areas languish. Look at post-Katrina New Orleans.

Woke this morning to the news from Las Vegas. I won't link because it is all over both broadcast and internet news sites. We turned on the TV to get what was known (not much yet) and then fairly quickly turned it off again when the anchors and "experts" started speculating on motive. Religion came up fairly quickly followed by Islam and ISIS. No facts support the speculation (as if conjecture requires fact) but I find it revealing and disgusting that, in this context, religion, Islam, and IS (or sometimes Al Qaeda) are linked as tightly as the Father-Son-Holy Ghost triad. But, of course, there is no mention of the possibility that religious motives might involve so-called Christians. I was surprised by how unsurprised I was.

Nor am I surprised that the strident voices for more gun control have already erupted. One title asked if we were "for" the NRA or the USA. I won't link because you can find the article yourself easily. The article progressed in the usual pattern: focus on the carnage, on the tragic deaths and woundings, then move onto the screed about the NRA and couch the argument in terms where one's loyalties should lie. My loyalties do not lie with the NRA but with the Constitution of the USA. You can argue on what the Second Amendment means and we have argued in court case after court case for years. However, until our legislators and president decide to approve a Constitutional amendment that either rescinds the Second Amendment entirely or changes it significantly it is still the law of the land, of the USA.

Here we are at the last day of September. Only three more months left in this strange, strange year. The temperature was at 50F a bit ago so it will probably dip down into the 40s before the sun comes up. I didn't get any work done outside. We decided, on the spur of the moment, to do our grocery shopping yesterday instead of today. During the summer we generally do that on the days the farm market is open but as the season winds down we don't have as much to buy there because we have already put up as much as we can in the space we have. By the time we came home and put things away the wind was kicking up so I decided not to fight it and left the gardens and outside clean up for today--I hope. Baker Creek sent out their e-mail announcing their 2018 catalogs so I ordered it. I already have a list of seeds started for next year.

So Price has resigned as HHS secretary. I wonder which parasite the Parasite-In-Chief will nominate to replacement. I doubt very much that the money angle bothered #45 much. I suspect it was the embarrassment and the fact that Price was supposed to smooth the way for the ACA repeal but failed to get that job done. The real lessons: don't embarrass the boss and give him enough progress toward what he wants to allow him to claim a biggly victory.

Garden Myths has a good review of a product I once used when I first began trying to start plants from seed--the Jiffy pellets. Actually I should say "peat pellets" because I used other brands as well. I stopped using them for reasons mentioned: they aren't big enough for the larger plants and the mesh that holds the peat together to form the "pot" isn't biodegradable. I dug the mesh out of my beds for several years and threw them away--after emptying the peat into the soil. Last year I started using toilet paper core tubes as my starter pots and will expand my use of them next spring. They soften when wet, help the soil retain moisture, and they are biodegradable. I was parsimonious and cut the tubes in half to make two pots. I won't do that this year because the half size is too small. And I found the roots do make their was out of the pot.

The temperatures are supposed to be a bit cooler today. Right now it is a bit overcast but the chances for rain are low. My brother brought the mini-greenhouse he picked up for me his church's rummage sale so I need to clean up the shed to make room for the old one. I will do that until (if?) it gets too warm to work outside. I got my hens 'n' chicks re-potted. I wanted to separate them but a couple of clusters were so tight I was afraid I would irreparably damage them so I left them as a clump.

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I didn't work outside at all. The clouds didn't clear off till around noon and I didn't want to fight the wind.

I found this early this morning--another WTF moment from our dysfunctional political administration. Or, rather, from the idiot at the top. The real difference between the responses to the hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico is how dark and how poor the populations are. And I would bet, if I were a betting person, that the richer and whiter sections of Texas and Florida will get rebuilt sooner and more completely than the poorer and darker sections. The pattern was set by Katrina (and maybe long before.) Update: I guess the criticism got to #45. He suspended the Jones Act for Puerto Rico so they can get more fuel and supplies in sooner. It is a sad when it takes public shaming on the internet and other outlets to get him to do what is right.

Well, we have had a busy morning. First, I had to do some cleaning and rearranging in the shed to make room for the old mini-greenhouse which was going to be retired to simply storage shelves for pots. But when we tried to put it in place we found it simply wouldn't go there--the shelves were too deep and I would have no room to move or reach the stuff stored further back. Soooo--we rearranged things a bit outside and it will work there for the same purpose. The new mini-greenhouse is a smaller model which fits in the space the old one used to occupy and leaves more room to get around. I hope it won't get direct sun as the other one did which might prolong the live of the cover. I actually had to cut the plastic on the old one and rip it off the support bars. My next project (tomorrow) is to get into the shed and start getting it sorted out and rearranged. It is amazing what one accumulates. Some we got because we had an idea and we found a cheap way to try it out. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. I found a couple of items from the failed experiments. They will go out in next week's trash.

Mom's eye doctor's appointment today so nothing much else done. Her insurance gave us a surprise we are still trying to figure out.

However, that doesn't mean I am not reading blogs and such. Case in point: Margaret and Helen. Amen, Helen. I couldn't say it better. We have been wondering if this is another diversion from what the administration and the congress critters are trying to do to us.

George Friedman has an interesting post today also. Although he does make a good point when he says we should expect the computer industry to take more responsibility for safety as we operate our vehicles (personal computers) on the appropriate road (the internet), we should also remember that we expect the drivers (of cars and computers) to exercise due care. We do expect that the manufacturers of cars build them to function safely though our expectations have been tempered by over 100 years and legal developments--which the computer industry hasn't had. And even then we should remember the air bag failures and break failures and the gaming of the emissions tests all of which made news over the last decade. Nor are we surprised much when some criminal hijacks/steals a car to commit another crime. Or when some idiot gets drunk and wrecks havoc with his vehicle.