April 21

We hard rains overnight with high winds. My wind chimes have been tinkling frantically. I pulled the first weeds from my containers. I hope things dry out a bit so I can get more of my pots prepped.

This piece, found on BBC, sound horribly familiar. India has experienced a rise in "Hindu nationalism" over the last few years that the Modi government has bought into. The effort to erase parts of history which Hindus might find uncomfortable reminds me of the effort to erase from accounts of American history that deal with slavery or Native genocide. I wonder if the effort to erase the Mughal era will go so far as to demolish the Taj Mahal? Anyone remember when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas because their religious sensibilities were offended?

The vicious civil war in Sudan between two generals has captured the news to the point where an anchor this morning declared that the U.S. HAD to do something about the situation. Why? And What can we do? There are a lot of problems in the world and we are not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. That is the definition of a certain god.

Le Monde published this story on flooding in Peru which sounds eerily like what has been happening in California. The experts cited attributed the unusual rain events to a "coastal El Niño" which is a localized warming of waters in the eastern Pacific.

Our Colorado river basin isn't the only river system having problems as another Le Monde article demonstrates. The Rhône has warmed significantly while its flow has both decreased and slowed. It has also significant demands on its water.

David Kaiser noted "The Problem of Authority". We don't really have a source of authority anymore and can't really agree on one. A few years ago a couple of women came by canvasing for some kind of educational "reform." They didn't like my answer to their last question positing that school discipline would be improved it we "brought prayer back into the classroom." I replied, strenuously, "Absolutely NOT!!" and asked "whose prayers?" That ended the conversation because they relied on the authority of their religion which I didn't share. Consider the piece above about Hindu nationalists trying to erase the Mughal era. I have seen at least three academic history arguments in my (sorta) misspent time in academia. I remember when history was primarily political/diplomatic history. I took an economics history class but it was offered by the Economics Department. I also took philosophy history but in the Philosophy Department not from the History Department. There were no "gender studies" or "black history" or other such segments of non-white, non-white-male history. By the late 1980s there was a backlash over those slices of history which we are still seeing today. Point here is that the Historical Orthodoxy shattered and, I think, for the better. But we still haven't found a new balance much less a new orthodoxy.

Another example of how screwed up some people are. An idiot fires a gun at a girl and her father who try to retrieve a ball that went into his yard. Another idiot fires on a car that mistakenly drives up on his driveway when the driver has already turned around and is leaving. A old idiot shoots, his door, a 16-year-old black boy who stands 5ft8inches thinking he is a grown 6ft black man trying to burgle his house. And this total efing idiot made pipe bombs to blow up reenacts and wrote letters claiming to be Antifa. As I said--screwed up.